Managing financial mismanagement in corporate governance: Re-branding real deal for public private partnerships in Nigeria

In certain spheres where government had gone ahead to experiment on Public Private Partnership, so much is expected by numerous stakeholders to ever justify the seemingly last resort. The inherent challenges undoubtedly are systemic as they boarder on the rediscovery, redefinition and redirection of organizational/institutional resources for higher productivity and ultimate sustainability. The Thinker Stinker Scan and ideal financial management tendency web exemplified in this paper are all geared towards harmonizing the apparent discordant financial management predispositions that tend to undermine public private partnership workability in Nigeria.

Scholars have classified infrastructure provision as the foundation of any modern economy. Nigeria like other African countries has been recording deficit in her infrastructural provision despite her quest to become a top 20 economy by the year 2020. It is against this background that the country has been trying to adopt different approaches to infrastructural provision in the country and PPP (Public Private Partnership) is an arrangement that has been accepted between the government and the private sector to meet up with international practices. Infrastructure projects require direct or indirect collaboration between Public and Private sector of the economy, thus political risks are always a factor especially in developing countries where the rule of law is weak and enforcement of contracts unreliable with no respect for property rights. This is the characteristics of PPP in Nigeria, where government never honors agreement. This necessitated this article to chart a new approach for both the government and private investors on how to develop a good relationship between both. The article uses a simple Cobb-Douglas production model to show the relationship between Infrastructure, economic growth and people's welfare. This explains why it is important for Nigeria to develop her critical infrastructure in order to achieve her vision. The article thereafter advocated a slight detour from the old arrangement of infrastructure concessionaire to a more robust approach that takes care of funding for investors, protection of consumers of infrastructure, and the creation of a sovereign wealth fund to assist investors.