Corporate governance research in Nigeria: a review

Abstract

This paper analyzes the state of corporate governance (CG) research in Nigeria. It consolidates the literature to identify the current state of CG research in Nigeria and to identity opportunities for future research in the literature. Among other things, the review show that the Board of directors (BOD) is the most explored corporate governance mechanism in the Nigerian corporate governance literature. Secondly, most studies focus on some governance mechanisms but ignore other governance mechanisms in firms. Thirdly, there is some consensus that the corporate governance failures in Nigeria is caused by multiplicity of factors mainly, lack of political will by the government to enforce corporate governance laws, deliberate refusal to comply with existing CG laws by politically connected firms, weak compliance by firms, weak enforcement by regulators, and conflicting codes in the country’s corporate governance codes. Also, the review shows that current CG studies do not systematically build on previous Nigerian CG studies which indicates a lack of direction in the Nigerian corporate governance literature. Regarding methodology, the findings reveal that most Nigerian CG studies are merely experimenting different methods of analysis without necessarily advancing the literature in a significant way. These findings have implications.