Despite the evident and contemporaneous concurrences in the political-economy and governance histories of Nigeria and Ghana, scholarly attention devoted to comparative interrogation of the public finance and the governance in the states is at low ebb. In this paper, we draw conceptual insights from public economics discourses of taxation and governance to argue that people-centered revenue profile relates significantly with comparative performances of government institutions. Matrix data were obtained from sampled respondents in Nigeria and Ghana and analysed for percentage analysis to validate the research conjectures. As predicted, the nexus between taxation and governance was generally weak, but nevertheless stronger in Ghana than Nigeria. In addition, the regulatory mechanisms for tax administration related positively to determine the nexus between taxation and governance in the study area. In addition, the study demonstrated a divergence in the states' political economies as well as in their regulatory mechanisms for taxation. Also, incentives played a key role in shaping the relationship between taxation and governance. Nevertheless, tax incentives fostered a weak positive relationship for taxation and governance in Nigeria and Ghana even though such appears stronger in the latter than the former.

Heretofore, development studies seldom focus on the systemic twists of capitalism and the colonial past that contributed immensely to dislocate the African states as global financial competitors. The article engages the nagging reconstruction of Africa’s development discourse, in particular, the debate about the fallout of global development paradigm that created ‘two publics’ of the West and others. The global economic order metamorphosed from mutuality interface into subordinate-superordinate relations. The aberration negates the freedom of the impoverished to trade and, specifically, made economic transformation in post-colonial Africa forlornly challenging—not necessarily for being a poor player but for the constant shift in the goalposts.

Critiques about the misconstrued thesis of Garrett Hardin’s (1968) classic essay entitled The Tragedy of the Commons are well documented. However, little is known of the remote and proximate causes of the pejorative confusion about the vital essay. This article engages the discursive reconstruction of the thesis from the management of the commons to the original intent about the unscrupulousness of unchecked population growth as a critical factor to the looming collapse of the earth. Deploying an eloquent metaphor, the devil in the number, the article reinvents the illogic of overpopulating the world while simultaneously pursuing the technocratic solutions to nature’s burden. The article reports four marked factors that swayed perception away from Hardin’s thesis. The significance of Hardin’s essay for the overburdened ecosystem as the harbinger for the socio-economic and governance crisis across the global divides is also discussed.

Textual representations in Kelani's Saworoide and Agogo-Eewo are utilised to explain the vulnerability of leaders of resource-dependent states in, especially, developing countries.