The total amount of loans by commercial banks to all tiers of government, increased to N1.77 trillion as at December, 2020, data by the National Bureau of Statistics indicated.
This is an increase of 18 percent from the N1.5 trillion reported in December 2019.
The data showed that the total loans written by the banks rose to N20.4 trillion in December, putting the exposure to government alone at 8.7 percent.
Oil/gas exploration and manufacturing top the highest beneficiary list with N3.9 trillion and N3.2 trillion respectively.
The two sectors’ share of the total banks’ loan portfolios 19.3 per cent and 15.7 per cent respectively.
This is followed by the agriculture sector with N1.05 trillion as of December 2020.
Power sector is among the list with N0.44 trillion.
The report said the the total non-performing loan (NPL) increased moderately from 6.01 percent to 6.02 per cent year-on-year (YoY), which is 1.02 percentage points above the five per cent industry’s benchmark.
“A total volume of 3,464,811,083 transactions valued at N356.47 trillion was recorded in Q4 2020 as data on electronic payment channels in the Nigeria banking sector revealed.
“Online transfers dominated the volume of transactions recorded; 2,227,449,949 volume of online transfer transactions valued at N120.27 trillion were recorded in Q4 2020,” it noted.
It said the total number of banks’ staff reduced by 0.9 per cent, from 95,888 to 95,026, between October and December.