Article Sidebar
Published:
Sep 15, 2025Keywords:
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright to submitted papers when accepted is transferred to the journal, together with the associated reproduction rights. The Publisher reserves the right to alter the text to suit the journal style, particularly in terms of punctuation, spelling and usage. If submitted article contains any material whose copyright (s) are held by other parties, then the author is required to have obtained all the necessary clearances or permissions and show evidence of having done so. Such permission must be sought for citations of text more than fifty words in length, figures/illustrations and/or tables originating or derived (adapted) from other sources.
Main Article Content
Centralized Political Institutions and the Fight against Corruption in Nigeria
Abstract
The prevalence of corruption among public office holders can be attributed to the institutional
weaknesses in dispensing corruption cases speedily as a result of overconcentration of power
at the center and lack of a proper deterrence mechanism in the fight against corruption in
Nigeria. This weakness had resulted in huge resource wastage and abuse of office by the
governors whose kleptomaniac behaviors have plummeted the state purse. The studies
assessed the efficiency of the centralized anti-corruption agencies in the war against
corruption and also try to interrogate whether the existing centralized system has helped the
fiscal decentralization of the loots recovered by anti-corruption agencies to the federating
states in Nigeria. The study was a qualitative descriptive type where data were collected and
analyzed using content analysis method. The study was anchored on fiscal decentralization
theory which justifies the need for effective fiscal decentralization in a federal system like
Nigeria. Findings of the study showed that the centralized political institutions like EFCC and
ICPC have not been effective in the fight against corruption owing to prolonged corruption
cases in courts and lack of a reasonable number of prosecutions since establishment. Also,
findings revealed that the current centralized approach has not aided the fiscal
decentralization of recovered loot to the federating states in Nigeria, an action which the 36
federating states tried hard to redress. The study recommends, among others, that the anti
corruption institutions must be decentralized with specialized courts to try corrupt public
officials speedily; the need for a fiscal decentralization approach in disbursing recovered loot
will go a long way in cushioning the effects of states that are victims of stolen money; and the
need for strict punitive penalties for prosecuted public office holders and total autonomy for
the anti-corruption agencies in Nigeria.
