Barriers to Effective Corporate Governance Reforms: Corruption and the Peculiar Case of Nigeria

Corporate governance reforms have been viewed as a means of improving the economic and social welfare of emerging economies and there have been efforts by the Nigerian government and its agencies to promulgate codes of best practices for companies in the country. There are critical questions regarding how effective these codes are in practice, and whether they are achieving the aims for which they were promulgated. Another pertinent issue is whether the codes of best practice actually complement and are complemented by the corporate legislation, because, ideally, meaningful corporate governance mechanisms should comprise of laws, regulations and principles working in synergy in order to achieve an overall atmosphere of effective corporate governance. This chapter discusses these issues and argues that corruption is a barrier to achieving the aims of corporate governance reforms and presents potential solutions to the problem of corruption in regard to creating effective corporate governance in Nigeria.