Funeral rites are normally performed at weekends in Ghana, and it is not uncommon for scholars to travel out of town for whole weekends to attend funerals. Attendance at these funerals is culturally mandatory. Ineffective time management would thus seem to be the first hurdle to cross in an attempt to successfully manage the publish or perish maxim. But scholars who defy these pro-blems discover that more substantial factors inhibit research that would lead to publications. Because of budgetary cuts, scho-lars in Africa do not have much fieldwork, laboratory research, and conference attendance.
Wages are too low for staff to sponsor trips by themselves.
In any case, they may have to spend valuable research time doing odd jobs to supplement their meagre incomes. It is therefore out of the question for these scholars to commit appreciable amounts of their personal incomes to supporting research activities. An important criterion many editors use to decide which papers they accept for publication is how well submissions address burning theoretical issues. If scho-lars at African Universities do not have access to the most recent discussions in their field, the papers they submit can hardly address current issues. Africa, however, lags far behind other parts of the world in the availability of these tools.