Suchergebnisse

In the last thirty years, deficit financing has become a major impediment to fiscal balance in the administration of public expenditure in Nigeria. From the middle of the 1980s up to the present, the federal government has consistently overspent its actual revenue accruals and have even borrowed in the pursuit of projects for which she has too little revenue backing. In fact, since the beginning of democratic rule in the current fourth republic, government has increasingly failed to balance its budget with grave consequences for price levels, interest rates, inflation and macroeconomic stability. This paper shows that deficit financing of public expenditure by the Nigerian government is however not a recent issue and that it can be traced to the formative years of Nigeria's public finance in the colonial period. The paper however argues that unlike the current practice, deficit financing was driven more in the colonial period by the need to build an infrastructure base for the economy rather than on personnel and overhead expenses manifested in the lopsided allocation of the greatest proportion of public revenues to the recurrent budget as it is the practice in Nigeria today.

This study presents an aspect of the history of Nigeria's public finance during the colonial period showing how public institutions created for the administrations of the country's finances either helped to curtail or failed to arrest corrupt practices from 1950–1960. The study argues that the issue of graft in government and by public officials which is prevalent in contemporary Nigeria was not a rarity in the colonial period and that at least, on the problems of theft of public revenues and the failure to observe the rules of accountability in public expenditure matters, cases of indictment of colonial officials were rife in the decolonisation period. The study therefore discusses how the problems of corruption and the refusal to observe the due processes of financial accountability were managed by the institutions established to ensure that they were either obliterated or reduced to the barest minimum in colonial Nigeria. The study concludes that although those institutions succeeded in reporting many cases and acts of corruption including even miscellaneous but nonetheless improper dealings with Nigerian finances, they failed either to prevent them or took very lame steps to ensure that indicted officials were sanctioned appropriately for such acts.

This study presents an analysis of the history of official corruption in colonial Nigeria based on the requirements of Nigerian laws against corruption and the actual reporting of corruption cases made by the Director of Audit from 1950–1960. It reveals that many of the proven cases of fraud were however not sanctioned as required by law and that this laid the foundation for a culture of impunity in the management of public resources in the immediate post-independence period. The paper concludes that cases of corrupt acts could probably have been mitigated had the due processes of financial reporting been strictly followed.

This volume examines Nigerian policy experiences across the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial eras. The focus is on gender issues in economic planning policies and productive sector policies including agriculture, entrepreneurship, and information and communication technologies.