| After the attainment of independence in 1960, Nigeria established state-owned enterprises in order to facilitate infrastructural development and assume control of the commanding heights of its economy. However, the performance of state-owned enterprises was dismal. One of the policy measures to resuscitate state-owned enterprises was the adoption of privatization processes and eventual transfer of economic activities hitherto provided by the state to private entities. Since the return to civil rule in 1999, the government has resolutely embarked on privatization policy. The privatization policy is expected to inject efficiency in the provision of public services, ensure economic welfare of Nigerians, create employment, promote market competitiveness, and transform the Nigerian economy. However, these expectations have been far from the realities.;It therefore canvasses that there should be a tectonic shift from mere transfer of public sector services to the private sector to a regime where all the complementary institutional structures for privatization processes are restructured. The study concludes by proposing interdependent categories of reforms to ameliorate the legal and institutional deficits in privatization processes in Nigeria.;This dissertation, therefore, examines the privatization processes at the federal level in Nigeria from the periods of 1999 to 2010. It explores some of the reasons why, since the implementation of the policy, the expectations are still remote from the realities. The thesis uses the institutional theory of economic development and conditional hypotheses for privatization to argue that the dysfunctions in the legal and institutional structures in Nigeria make it difficult to effectively achieve the leitmotifs of the policy. Specifically, the study explores how the divestiture law, corporate governance regime, regulatory quality of post-privatization regulatory agencies, competition regime, tax administration, the judiciary, and land tenurial systems contribute significantly to the inability to realize the goals of the policy. Further, it argues that the failure to attain the aims of the policy occurs in part because the implementation of the policy has been mostly approached only from the perspective of transferring public sector activities to the private sector without a consideration of the institutional environment under which the divestitures take place. |
