Corporate Governance in Nigeria

Abstract

The post-economic reform programme in the 1990s ushered in a new business environment as well as challenges associated with effective corporate governance, especially for financial institutions such as banks. Analysis of governance occurrences based on several reports indicated that existing codes and government regulations failed to resolve significantly the fundamental causes of corporate governance failures. More so, due to the complex interactions between internal and external factors in the business environment attempts to produce a corporate governance framework that met certain international standard still proved difficult. Although previous studies on corporate governance in Nigeria have reasserted thinking about alternative governance mechanisms (Okike 2007), limited research exists on understanding the underlying social/cultural phenomena and relationships with governance. That said, certain academics have argued for the evolution and refinement of alternative corporate governance frameworks to reflect issues peculiar to specific environments or organisations (Daily et al. 2003; Sonnenfeld 2002), especially for banks in developing countries (Arun and Turner 2004).