Basicly, i have a site that i cant remove the
<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow" />
but i want list of links to be dofollow. If i write rel="dofollow" on each of these href, will they prevail over the meta tag and actually become dofollow or will they remain nofollow?
As far as I know, there is no such thing as rel="follow" or rel="dofollow" so adding that to links won't work. It's always assumed that links should be followed unless otherwise specified, not vice-versa.
EDIT: This post from Matt Cutts confirms that "nofollow" always takes priority.
Using robots.txt will not work because that only specifies what pages should be indexed or not. Nofollow, on the other hand, specifies to either ignore a link (if attached to a link), or all links on the page (if used in the meta tag like this question). Nofollowed pages can and will be indexed.
Unfortunately, the only route available to you is fix the broken system that is adding the meta nofollow in the first place.