Banking Sector Performance and Corporate Governance in Nigeria: A Discriminant Analytical Approach

This paper sets out to investigate the impact of corporate governance on the banking sector performance. Precisely, it examined firstly, how each variant in the corporate governance structure discriminates against the performance of the banking sector and secondly whether the executive directors and non executive directors are associated negatively and significantly with non performing loans. To accomplish these objectives, the researchers employed discriminant analysis, correlation coefficient and the spearman rank correlation as an alternate method. The results of the analysis revealed that foreign ownership contributed about 187.77 percent of the total discriminant score for the function thereby propelling foreign ownership as the most discriminant ownership variable in banks performance and also implying that a bank’s chance of belonging to the group of highly performing banks increases as its foreign ownership increases. The poor performance of the board ownership is not as severe as that of the institutional ownership and government ownership which made the poor and poorer contributions respectively. The results also show that both executive directors and non-executive directors are not significantly associated with non-performing loans. On the basis of these findings, the researchers recommend that the Central Bank of Nigeria in liaison with the Nigerian Deposit and Insurance Corporation should extend intensive surveillance on the role of the directors in the banking sector.