CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Part of developments in any country is widely held to be infrastructural. Infrastructural development, in a simplistic sense connotes the increase and improvement in industries and production processes leading to greater output of goods and services as well as the welfare of the entire citizenry. In Akwa Ibom infrastructural development has taken a central place in the various development plans or programmes with the ultimate goal of breaking the vicious circle of poverty and under development. Inspite of the lofty development plans, which focused on infrastructural development in Akwa Ibom State, the state is still lagging behind when compared with some of its contemporaries in the league of states in Nigeria. With the burst in oil revenues and other rest natural resources, Akwa Ibom was viewed to have reached the turning point and set forth in the path to economic growth and industrial development. Contrary to expectation, Akwa Ibom is apparently lagging behind its aforementioned contemporaries. There seems to be some missing links in the path to infrastructural development attempts have been made to explain the rather paradox; one key factor seems to the recurring and to which the backwardness in our infrastructural development have been attributed to.
This of course is due to lack of sufficient capital. Infrastructural development involves massive and intensive Investment in Capital Stock i.e. Stock of productive assets. Since these represent long-term investment, it is thus expedient to source for the appropriate finance to meet the nature of investments financial institutions like banks are saddled with the important role of financial intermediation by mobilizing and channeling fund towards productive capacity generation and expansion. Between 1987, when the state was created and 1999, Akwa Ibom has witnessed an exponential increase in the numbers of banks (commercial and merchant). Naturally, the same burst was expected in the level of savings and amount of loanable funds available for investment in the industrial sector that world take the economy out of the doldrums it would be an over-simplification to assume an equal proportional relationship between the numbers of banks and availability of loan able funds for infrastructural investment.
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