Olumide Famuyiwa∗
ABSTRACT
The crisis in the Nigerian financial system from 2008 to 2009 triggered an explosion of scholarly debates on the legal and institutional inadequacies of the Nigerian financial regulatory system that contributed to its inability to anticipate or prevent the financial crisis. Many of the analyses however have yet to consider closely the part played by sub-optimal enforcement of financial laws and regulations before the crisis and how this created opportunities for the crisis. This paper argues for a supervisory failure account of the Nigerian financial crisis. It conceives this failure as an incidence of sup-optimal enforcement of regulatory norms, induced by low or weak regulatory accountability and which largely provides opportunities for a financial crisis. Through a normative analysis of the indicators public sector and financial regulation accountability, it demonstrates how the crisis could have been prevented. In doing so, the paper partly examines the legal and institutional problems of financial regulation in Nigeria; how the Nigerian financial system fared during the financial crisis of 2008 to 2009; and what could have been done to prevent the crisis.
∗ Doctoral Candidate and College Lecturer, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Email: olumide.famuyiwa@law.ox.ac.uk