Banking Law

In Corporate Governance in Africa, Victor Ediagbonya embarks on a critical examination of the corporate governance landscape within the African banking sector, offering a well-reasoned and empirically grounded challenge to the wholesale transplantation of the Anglo-Saxon model into sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing from institutional and stakeholder theories, Ediagbonya proposes a ‘Functional Stakeholder Model’ (FSM) as a context-sensitive alternative governance framework. This book stands as a significant contribution to both comparative corporate governance and the broader discourse on institutional reform in developing economies.

Corporate Governance in Africa, authored by Victor Ediagbonya, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Brighton, addresses a pressing but underexplored problem in African banking. The book examines the failure of corporate governance frameworks to protect the interests of stakeholders such as employees and customers when banks collapse. It argues that Nigeria and South Africa have adopted the Anglo-Saxon corporate governance model from the United Kingdom, a model designed around shareholder primacy and premised on the existence of strong legal institutions and active financial markets.

Victor Ediagbonya’s Corporate Governance in Africa advances a compelling, context-sensitive critique of the transplantation of the Anglo-Saxon, shareholder-centric corporate governance model into African banking systems, particularly Nigeria and South Africa, and proposes a tailored alternative: the Functional Stakeholder Model (‘FSM’). The book’s thesis is straightforward yet significant: corporate governance “best practice” from developed economies performs unevenly when exported to jurisdictions with different institutional realities; banking sectors in countries marked by institutional voids, weak legal enforcement, insider dominated ownership, underdeveloped capital markets, and systemic corruption, require frameworks that are explicitly designed to recognise and protect a broader set of stakeholders beyond shareholders.

The Anglo-Saxon corporate governance model practised by most African countries traditionally seeks to protect only the shareholders as the residual owners of an enterprise. (Ngwu, Osuji and Stephen, 2017). The engagement and protection of the interests of various other stakeholders have become an important corporate governance discourse in academia as well as in practice. Given the complexity of the African business environment, the importance of effective stakeholder management cannot be overemphasised and has been a topical issue in recent times. Dr Victor Ediagbonya’s book “Corporate Governance in Africa” presents a transformative exposition of stakeholder management issues in Africa’s banking sector with key references to Nigeria and South Africa.

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.