Public administration scholarship of the 21st century has tended to focus more on recent paradigms of New Public Management (NPM) and its successor paradigm of governance while largely ignoring the strong foundation of century old paradigms of public administration. This approach, if persistently allowed in African universities, will create a serious knowledge deficit among the new crop of African scholars in the discipline of public administration. Where efforts have been made to consider the foundational paradigms of public administration through a historical trajectory, emphasis is again given to the evolution of public administration from American and European contexts, completely ignoring the indigenous African systems of administration. Yet, pre-colonial Africa had not only one but several systems of administration and governance structures that ought to be known by African students and scholars of public administration. In thi