Introduction
Privatization as a policy has existed in one form or another since antiquity. In ancient Greece, the state retained ownership of land, forests, and mines but ceded the provision of services to the private sector. The ancient Romans and Mesopotamians contracted out virtually all services in the state to private individuals and companies. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church devised a scheme that allowed landlords and tenant farmers to partner with the state.
Although there was a resurgence of privatization during the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, it was first introduced into the modern economic lexicon in the 1950s, with the privatization of British Steel by Winston Churchill (Parker & Saal, 2003; Yoffee, 2001). The word, however, gained prominence as a policy instrument with the rise of conservative governments in Britain, the United States, and France in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Starr, 1988). This study provides a detailed discussion of the concept, methods, and role of the private sector in ports’ logistics development and their operations in Chapter 2.
Over the past 30 years, countries have implemented privatization policies, intending to structure and stabilize their economies. While the transition economies of Eastern Europe pursued the privatization of their state-owned enterprises (SOEs) as a strategy for transiting quickly from state-controlled to market-driven economies following the disintegration of the former Soviet Union, the countries of subsaharan Africa (SSA) embraced privatization for quite a different reason. The latter adopted privatization at the insistence of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) with the strict implementation of the Structural Adjustment
Program (SAP) as a precondition for the provision of economic relief packages. Economic relief became necessary when the subsaharan African countries faced serious macroeconomic challenges including budgetary constraints, widening current accounts, growing foreign debt, rising inflation, and balance of payment difficulties in the mid-1980s (Al-Obaidan, 2002).
Nigeria is one of the SSA countries that embraced privatization, a policy instrument of the neoliberal growth theory of the early 1980s. According to neoliberal growth theory, the property rights conferred by way of privatization incentivizes the private sector to make a greater investment, intending to achieve higher efficiency gains, better services, increased productivity, and profitability (Tongzon and Heng, 2005). To date, Nigeria has undertaken the privatization of over 167 SOEs in power, telecommunications, financial services, and manufacturing (Chigbue & Bureau of Public Enterprises [BPE], 2007). A total of 24 of Nigeria’s seaports were among the SOEs privatized by the Nigerian government (Adi, Iheanachor, Ndukwe, & Dim, 2013; Eniola, Njoku, Oluwatosin, & Okoko, 2014; Jaja, 2011; Oghojafor, Kuye, & Alaneme, 2012). As recently as 2012, Nigeria privatized 17 successor companies of its erstwhile electricity monopoly, renowned for its epileptic power supply, brownouts, and blackouts, after a lengthy sectorial reform process.
Apart from the introductory section, there are 12 sections in this introductory chapter to the study. The first section provides background for this study. The section commences with a brief summary of the research literature related to the growth impact of the privatization of ports. The section also presents the literature relevant to the scope of the study topic and describes the knowledge gap I sought to address. The next section presents a statement of the research
problem, including a summary of the evidence of the currency, relevance, and significance of the study to policy analysis. The section also identifies the gap in the literature that the study was intended to address. The third section addresses the purpose of the study; in the fourth section, I present and discuss the research question(s) and hypotheses. The section also identifies the independent and dependent variables of the study, together with the relationship expected and the measurement. The next section introduces the theoretical framework and identifies the theories that underlie the concept of privatization, including their origins and sources, major theoretical propositions, primary hypotheses, and nexus with the study approach and research questions.
The section following presents the research design and methodology, along with their justification. The succeeding section provides a concise definition of the variables of the study and the underlying assumptions.
The ensuing section justifies the focus on the aspects of the research problem that the study addressed. This section delimitates the boundaries of the study, the populations examined, and the theoretical framework underlying the study. Additionally, the section addresses the generalizability of the study. In the 10th section, the study identifies the perceived design and methodological limitations; the section that follows identifies, the potential contributions of the study to knowledge in public policy and analysis and the potential implications for positive social change. This chapter concludes with a presentation of the highlights of the chapter, together with a transition to the literature review in Chapter 2.
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