LEADERSHIP, CORRUPTION AND GOVERNANCE IN NIGERIA (1999-2013)

Abstract

The interface among leadership, corruption, and governance could be likened to the chicken-egg controversy in that while some commentators attribute the pervasive corruption that has bedeviled Nigeria's body politic to bad leadership and irresponsible governance practices, which they say have corrupted the polity, others view corruption as systemic and therefore prior to inept leadership and irresponsible governance. In this sense, corruption is seen as engendering low levels of transparency and accountability and as being the major source of development failure in most of the developing world. Be that as it may, the place of leadership in curbing corruption and the institution of good governance cannot be overstated. In view of this, this paper examines the role of leadership in tackling corruption in Nigeria between 1999 and 2013, and how the meager achievements recarded in this quest had a debilitating impact on the provision of dividends of democrotic governance during Nigeria's first ever full decade of democrotic experiment. The study is anchored on the theory of the rentier state and employed qualitative descriptivemethodfor the collectionandanalysisof data