Banking Distress and the Erosion of Public Confidence in the Nigerian Banking System

Abstract

In the Nigeria banking industry, corrective policies have been inevitably applied to punctuations occasioned by systemic distresses which tend to grossly erode the trust and confidence reposed on the banking system. The CBN in 2005 embarked on reforms targeted at increasing banks capital base which will in turn make banks withstand shocks as well as distresses. The 2005 reform having been implemented, this study examined the extent to which the reforms have been able to encourage savings in terms of deposit liabilities for the entire banking firms in Nigeria. The variables for the study captured the deposit liability of the Nigerian banking industry which was decomposed to demand, time, savings as well as total deposit liability of the Nigerian banking industry. No individual bank or a sample of banks was selected to be studied since the entire population of the banking industry investigated. The models were structured to capture the growth or decline trends of the deposit liability (demand, savings, time, and total deposit liabilities) of the Nigerian banking industry before and after the 2005 banking sector reforms. From our findings, essentially, the post reform average growth rates are higher than the pre reform growth rates although the differences between the two periods are essentially lower than 10%. The findings are suggestive that the 2005 concluded banking reform has corrected the erosion of public confidence witnessed before the reform.

Keywords: Bank distress; demand deposit; savings deposit; time deposit; total deposit liabilities.