The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mr. Godwin Emefiele, has rebutted claims in certain quarters suggesting that the Bank’s targeted interventions in the agricultural sector are tilted in favour of a certain section of the country.
He was speaking on Tuesday May 18, 2021 in Ado-Ekiti, Ekiti State while unveiling the 2020 wet season harvest aggregation and flag-off of the 2021 wet season input distribution in the South-West geo-political zone under the CBN-RIFAN Anchor Borrowers’ Programme.
According to him, the claim is unfair as the Bank’s interventions in the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP) were not only about rice production but had expanded to over 21 crops and were evenly spread across the country.
He added that more than N300 billion had been disbursed to companies operating in the southern part of Nigeria, citing companies and farmers across Lagos, Edo, Ondo, Ogun, Osun, Ekiti, Bayelsa, Rivers, Cross River as major beneficiaries of the Bank’s interventions.
Mr. Emefiele emphasized the importance of synergy among stakeholders and charged them to continually make consistent and positive strides towards attaining food security, noting that attaining self-sufficiency in food production will not come cheap.
He also stressed the need to make deliberate efforts towards attracting youths into the agriculture sector in order to guarantee its sustainability since the youths remain the future of the nation.
“We must meet them half-way to ensure that we provide the enabling environment to make agriculture attractive to them,” he noted, adding that “the Central Bank of Nigeria stands ready to support youths that are willing to engage in agriculture.”
He therefore enjoined Nigerian youths to embrace agriculture, noting that the “They have the talent, energy, enthusiasm, technological adoption capacity and all the right drive to revolutionize agricultural production in Nigeria.