IN its commitment to ensuring that bank customers are not burdened with excessive charges from their banks, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) disclosed on Wednesday it has recovered over N50 billion from banks.
Acting Director, Corporate Communications of the CBN Mr Isaac Okorafor who spoke at the ongoing Abuja International Trade Fair urged bank customers to go to the CBN website to see the approved charges banks are expected to make of their customers.
In addition, dissatisfied customers should report incidences of excessive charges to the apex bank.
Explaining some development finance interventions of CBN particularly in agriculture, Okorofor declared that N43.92 billion has so far been disbursed to local farmers through its flagship Anchor Borrowers Programme (ABP).
Through the ABP, executed in association with 13 participating financial institutions, 233,000 hectares of farmland were currently being cultivated by 200,000 smallholder farmers in eight commodities of rice, wheat, maize, cotton, soya beans, poultry, cassava and groundnuts in addition to fish farming.
Under the ABP, “at harvest, the smallholder farmers supplies his or her produce to the Agro-processor, who pays the cash equivalent to the farmer’s account.
“We cannot let our farmers go hungry while we enrich farmers from other countries. This is why we said for some certain items, which are 41 in number if you want to import any of them, go and look for your own foreign exchange.
“As a complementary
measure, we put in place the Anchor borrowers programme for agriculture to make farmers rise up and fill the space and gap created by the non-importation of those items.
“The programme has given us over two million tons of rice when our national demand is at about six million tons. This has taken our national output to about four million tons in the first year.”
With the effort, the bank is hopeful that Nigeria will further add additional two million tons of rice in 2017, thus taking local production to six million tons.
“We are envisaging that by this time next year, Nigeria should be self-sufficient in rice production,” Okorafor stated while explaining that CBN currently has 17 intervention programmes in its quest to boost the economy through non-oil exports and conserve foreign exchange.
Some of the interventions include Agricultural Credit Guarantee Scheme fund, N200 billion Commercial Agricultural Credit Scheme, N200 billion SME Restructuring and Refinancing Facility and the N300 billion power and airline intervention fund.
Others are Youth Entrepreneurship Development Programme, Nigeria Electricity Market Stabilisation Facility, Export Rediscounting and Refinancing Facility, Export Stimulation facility and Paddy Aggregation Scheme amongst others.
Okorafor reiterated the bank’s commitment to continually reel out proactive policies and schemes to ensure that the Nigerian economy remained strong and sufficient through non-oil exports.
Speaking earlier, Second Deputy President, Abuja Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ABUCCIMA) Alh. Al-Mujtaba Abubakar, urged the CBN to reconsider some of its policy stands as it negatively impacts on small businesses.
“Whilst we commend the CBN for its roles in getting our economy out of recession, we want to emphasise that the subsisting high lending rate is stifling production and productivity of the real sector.”