Institutions, Corruption and the Anti-Corruption Architecture in Nigeria's Public Sector: A Conceptual Review

Abstract

Corruption remains one of the most persistent obstacles to development in Nigeria. It undermines formal institutions, weakens the social contract between government and citizens, and has been associated with the loss of substantial public resources through bribery, embezzlement, procurement fraud, and other illicit practices. Yet, the concept of corruption, as well as the institutional architecture established to control it, remains contested and unevenly understood. This paper provides a conceptual review of the relationship between institutions and corruption in Nigeria's public sector. It examines the concept of institutions and distinguishes among their formal, informal, social, economic, and political forms. It also conceptualises corruption through the four-dimensional framework of entrusted power, abuse, private gain, and public interest. The paper further traces the historical evolution of corruption from primary to secondary and tertiary forms and examines the major forms of corruption found within Nigeria's public sector, including bribery, extortion, auto-corruption, contracting fraud, subsidy misuse, favouritism, prebendalism, neopatrimonialism, deliberate waste, legalised corruption, and bureaucratic corruption. In addition, the paper reviews Nigeria's legal, institutional, media, and civil-society anti-corruption architecture and examines public procurement and the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) as important components of this architecture. Drawing on structural functionalism, the paper argues that Nigeria's anti-corruption institutions cannot be understood simply as either functional or weak. Rather, there is a persistent gap between their manifest institutional mandates and their latent consequences and performance. This gap is associated with the country's neopatrimonial political economy, political interference, weak enforcement capacity, and institutional constraints. The paper concludes by drawing implications for management scholarship and practice, particularly regarding institutional design and implementation in weak-enforcement environments.