The upsurge of interests in the decisive role of the state in economic development especially in Africa in the past three decades have raised questions about the distribution of power, how authority distorts the formal declarations of government policy and the composition of the public elites in sustaining their power, wealth and status. The character of the African state as the instrumental and decisive actor in development has been associated with the endemic and systematic levels of political corruption in most African states. In this paper, I present an analysis of the political economy perspective of the emergence of theorizing on the African state with emphasis on the corrupt African state, which provides an in-depth understanding to the study of the pervasiveness of political corruption in Africa. The political economy perspective of the corrupt African state examines the colonial legacies of the personalization of public office, the creation of administrative hierarchy through the concentration of political and authoritative functions, and a government that did not distinguish between decision-making and implementation roles. These colonial administrative structures inherited from the eve of independence, I will argue contributes to the political economy perspective of theorizing on the corrupt African state, where the state, the key instrumental actor for the extraction of resources for development, serves as the arena where state property and jobs are allocated in solidarities to domestic and foreign influence.