Thought and Practice: A Journal of the Philosophical Association of Kenya

Volume 3, Issue 1, June 2011

The Ethics of Government Privatisation in Nigeria

This paper seeks to determine whether or not the divesture of Nigeria’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) by the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) is ethical. Towards this end, it employs an analytic methodology to undertake a conceptual examination of the divesture of Nigeria’s SOEs by the FGN. The paper’s findings are: (1) A large proportion of the Nigerian citizenry is opposed to its government’s privatization policy. (2) A conducive socio-economic environment for privatization is lacking in Nigeria. The paper concludes that although privatization in general may be a “good” policy, it is ethically wrong for the FGN to privatize some (and perhaps most) of its SOEs, given the absence of a conducive socio-economic milieu.