CORRUPTION AS A SOCIAL NORM IN NIGERIA: RETHINKING ACCOUNTABILITY IN PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS

Despite decades of institutional reforms, anti-corruption campaigns, and legal enforcement mechanisms, corruption remains deeply entrenched in Nigeria’s public institutions. This persistence suggests that corruption cannot be adequately understood only as individual misconduct or institutional failure, but must also be examined as a socially embedded practice governed by shared expectations and informal rules. This article argues that in Nigeria, corruption has in many contexts evolved into a social norm an expected and routinized mode of interaction between citizens and public officials rather than an exceptional or deviant behavior. Drawing on social norms theory and institutional analysis, the paper conceptualizes corruption as a collective action problem sustained by mutual expectations, social pressures, and weak normative legitimacy of formal rules. It further demonstrates how this normative environment undermines conventional accountability mechanisms, transforming oversight institutions into performative or selectively applied instruments rather than effective constraints on power. The article then proposes a rethinking of accountability that goes beyond legalistic enforcement toward strategies aimed at norm change, including elite signaling, protection of integrity, narrative transformation, and the creation of institutional enclaves of ethical practice. By reframing corruption in Nigeria as a problem of social equilibrium rather than merely a problem of law-breaking, the paper contributes to debates in governance, political sociology, and development studies, and offers a more context-sensitive foundation for understanding both the persistence of corruption and the limits of conventional reform strategies.