Stemming Nigeria’s Over-Reliance on Oil and Banking Sectors: An Empirical Investigation of Alternate Initiatives

This Paper examined the impact of non-oil and non-banking initiatives as potent alternatives to Nigeria’s overdependence on oil and banking sectors in gravitating the Nigerian economy. In the process, the agricultural, manufacturing and mining sectors stood out as dominant real sector components and proxied the alternative to oil sector; whilst the tax sector stood in as service sector alternative for the banking sector. Data were purposively sourced for the period spanning 1994 to 2020. Statistical tools were applied to cover descriptive, correlation and regression analyses. As a corollary, the test conducted for co-integration confirmed the existence of a long-run equilibrium among the variables utilized. The findings revealed that non-oil exports had a huge positive impact on the Nigerian economy. As a logical extension, this development suggests that a unit increase in non-oil export raises GDP considerably. It also underlines the importance of weaning the Nigerian economy off of its reliance on oil by promoting non-oil exports as significant drivers of foreign exchange profits in Nigeria.