Analysis

Victor Ediagbonya’s Corporate Governance in Africa offers a thoughtful and carefully structured engagement with one of the most persistent challenges in African corporate governance: the continued prevalence of governance failures despite the widespread adoption of sophisticated legal and regulatory frameworks. Rather than attributing these failures solely to doctrinal gaps, the book invites a deeper examination of the institutional environments within which corporate governance operates, particularly in the banking sector.

The Functional Stakeholder Model represents a significant and original contribution to contemporary corporate governance discourse in Africa. The book succeeds in reframing how corporate governance can be conceptualised and implemented in institutionally challenging contexts, offering a compelling alternative to governance transplantation narratives. By grounding its analysis in African regulatory realities, the book provides a strong foundation for ongoing scholarship and policy engagement. It is therefore strongly recommended to scholars of corporate governance, banking regulation, and African development, as well as practitioners and policymakers seeking context-sensitive approaches to governance reform.

This paper provides a comprehensive scholarly and evaluative overview of Victor Ediagbonya’s Corporate Governance in Africa, highlighting its central arguments, methodological strengths, theoretical contributions, and significance as an important contribution to knowledge in corporate governance, banking regulation, and African political economy.

Research on corporate governance is frequent and covered by many disciplines including of course law and, in many cases, interdisciplinary. What is not frequent however, is an investigation into corporate governance in the African region specific to industry sectors. This is an important gap that needed to be filled, and Dr Ediagbonya is one of the first scholars to commence filling it. His book, Corporate Governance in Africa, is a region specific and industry specific investigation on an appropriate and reliable corporate governance framework which is both stable, yet adaptable for the peculiarities of the region.

This book is an excellent contribution to the analysis of corporate governance frameworks from emerging countries. It analyses a timely issue of corporate governance in the banking industry of two African countries, Nigeria and South Africa, with some of the largest economies based on gross domestic product (see the introduction). The banking sector in Africa is a sector of significant growth, although significantly concentrated. McKinsey insights points out that ‘performance in Africa’s banking system is driven by a diverse mix of markets, each with its own unique strategies and challenges.

This Symposium is dedicated to a critical engagement with Corporate Governance in Africa, a timely and significant contribution to the growing body of scholarship on governance across the continent. The book provides a nuanced exploration of the legal, institutional, and practical dimensions of corporate governance in diverse African jurisdictions, offering insights that are both contextually grounded and theoretically informed. This symposium brings together scholars to reflect on, interrogate, and extend the arguments advanced in this book.

Under the relevant rules of the law of treaties as provided for in Article 11 of the Viena Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT), a state’s consent to be bound by a treaty “may be expressed by signature, exchange of instruments constituting a treaty, ratification, acceptance, approval or accession, or by any other means if so agreed.” It appears from the text of Article 11 of the VCLT that expression of consent to a treaty must generally be by means of an express or overt act, notice of which must be given, or received by, the other parties to the treaty. In contrast to the above legal position, the practice of some ECOWAS Member States in relation to Protocols governing the ECOWAS Court of Justice raises the question of whether a state’s consent to be bound by a treaty may be implied from its conduct. Of particular interest in this regard, is the Republic of Cape Verde. This essay seeks to determine whether the concept of implied consent could offer a conceptual justification for the exercise of the ECOWAS Court’s jurisdiction over Member States that have either not signed or ratified the relevant Protocols governing the Court’s jurisdiction.

Promoting economic cooperation and development among Member States has been the primary aim of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) since its inception in 1975. Unsurprisingly, in the beginning, the Community’s only judicial body, the ECOWAS Court, only had a mandate to foster socio-economic integration. Consequently, when the Court was granted a human rights mandate in 2005, it was expected that advancing economic justice and safeguarding economic rights would underpin its adjudicatory functions. The economies of countries in West Africa exhibit a significant gender gap, which manifests in various ways, including the gender pay gap, women disproportionately engaged in informal and vulnerable employment, unequal access to job opportunities, occupational segregation, unequal asset ownership, limited access to financial services, and unpaid care work.In this blog post, we provide a brief overview of two cases decided by the ECOWAS Court that concern women’s rights to work, showcasing the Court’s role in promoting women’s economic justice in the West African sub-region and beyond. However, before discussing these cases, which inform our conclusions, we briefly explore the nature of the right to work for women within the African human rights system.

In an ever-growing quest for gender equality, it is quite common for scholars and researchers to overlook regional and sub-regional systems while prioritizing global institutions, particularly the United Nations, its specialized agencies, and other international human rights mechanisms. The limited attention given to regional bodies stems from their perceived lack of influence in implementing meaningful reforms compared to global institutions. Unbeknownst to many, regional systems, despite their marginalization, have developed contextually relevant, progressive policy documents and delivered consequential legal judgments on women's rights. However, as is the case with many international, regional or sub-regional organizations, the perennial challenges remain the translation of the policies and enforcing the far-reaching judgements on women’s rights. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) embodies this paradox.

The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice occupies a central place in the legal architecture of West African regional integration, with jurisdiction spanning human rights, trade, and the interpretation and application of Community law. Yet its authority continues to sit uneasily with the persistent gap between judicial pronouncement and practical effect. Judgments are frequently delayed in implementation, and in many instances not implemented at all, a pattern widely reported by court officials and observers. If effectiveness is assessed primarily through implementation and compliance, the Court’s institutional challenge is therefore not merely one of doctrinal coherence, but of execution.