Corporate governance research in Nigeria: a review

This paper is a literature review of recent corporate governance research in Nigeria. It identifies the recent advances and challenges in the literature and suggest some directions for future research. A comprehensive review of the recent corporate governance literature is important because it provides a basis to compare the corporate governance experience in Nigeria with the corporate governance experience in other African countries and developing countries. The findings from the literature review reveal that the board of directors is the most explored corporate governance determinant in the Nigerian corporate governance literature. Most studies focus on some corporate governance determinants, and ignore other corporate governance determinants in firms. There is some consensus that corporate governance failure in Nigeria is caused by multiplicity of factors such as lack of political will by the government to enforce corporate governance laws, deliberate refusal to comply with existing corporate governance laws by politically connected firms, weak compliance by firms, weak enforcement by regulators, and conflicting codes in the country’s corporate governance codes. Also, recent corporate governance studies do not systematically build on previous corporate governance studies. Regarding methodology, most Nigerian corporate governance studies are merely experimenting different methods of analyses without advancing the literature in a significant way. The study also finds that the 2018 Nigerian code of corporate governance solves some problems and create new problems for Nigerian firms.