Sets up committee to address bottlenecks
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has condemned the non-accessibility of the N500 billion export stimulation fund set up basically for the promotion of non-oil exports in the country.
As such, the CBN has set up a committee to look into the challenges confronting accessibility of the funds.The apex bank and Nigeria Export-Import Bank (NEXIM) had in 2017 approved an export facility of N500 billion for exporters in the country, which till date farmers find difficult to access.
The CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, disclosed this yesterday at a media conference on the sidelines of the ongoing 10th yearly bankers’ committee retreat in Lagos.
Emefiele said the apex bank had discovered that farmers and small businesses within the non-oil sector found it difficult to access the funding facility.
He said: “We need to set up a committee headed by a bank chief executive officer. What that committee will do is to take a deep dive into some of the issues and challenges that are faced by exporters and report back to the bankers’ committee meeting in February 2019 to raise some of the issues and through that, the banks themselves will commit to ensuring that we deploy funds either on a commercial basis through the banks or some of our intervention funds at the CBN to support the initiative.
“We took a review of it, we must confess that that aspect has not permeated the system and we wanted to hear from some of the export companies what their challenges were, hence the reason we set up a committee to look into the issue.
“By this time, we are determined that they will get the support they need, we will make it easy for them to access the credit and will put in place policies that will reinvent the export earnings in a way that funds come in and are used in a way that is beneficial to the economy.”
