The Interim Board of the Bank of Agriculture has been inaugurated by the Nigerian Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Audu Ogbeh.

The interim Board has been urged to work out modalities to restructure the Bank, seek new partnership, reduce lending rates and recover loans.

Mr. Ogbeh said Nigeria needed to earn foreign exchange and the only sector that could guarantee that aside the oil sector was the Agriculture sector.

Cost of fund
He advised the new board to seek out ways to make the Agriculture lending rate a single Digit.

“One of the challenges we faced with Agric lending is the cost of fund, at 18-22% definitely no farmer will survive, so you have to design how to make the interest rate one digit.”

“As at today your bank is not digitalised at all; I’m told you still use pass books; you have to find out how quickly we can help you digitalise, because we expect that in five years you will be the largest Bank in the country, the most wide spread, we want you to operate in all the local government,” Minister said.

In the area of debt, the Minister urged them to go after debtors that owe the bank to recover bad loans by taking measures like giving 90 days ultimatum and publishing the debtors’ names in the media.

According to him, “You have some debts to recover, I don’t know the exact amount owed your bank but try and get the money back, you may feel free to inform those who owe you that in the next 90 days, you expect them to start paying back. Feel free to take adverts and do all the publicity you wants, informing your creditors that they will have to pay and they should start doing so as quickly as possible.”

Mr. Ogbeh also asked the new board to take over the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Anchor Borrowers Scheme.

He assured the board of the government’s full support in the areas of funding, staffing and digitisation.

In his response, the new Interim Managing Director of the Bank, Mr. Kabiru Mohammed said the activities of the Bank would support the Government’s agriculture plan to help attain food sufficiency and food security.

“There is need to diversify the economy by improving the Agriculture sector in food production, food security and the rest, we assure you that we will support the Ministry’s Agric transformation agenda, we want to also assure you that we are committed to serving our father’s land.”

Mohammed said they would look into the Minister’s suggestions and act accordingly.

“Now that we have taken over, we are going to carefully analyse the Minister’s briefing, we will study all the technical reports that have been made for restructuring the Bank and we will do justice to make sure we come out with workable plans that will help us achieve the set objectives.”

“And I assure you Sir, before the end of next month our work plan will be on your table for consent and approval and there after we will take off,” he assured.

Mohammed promised to work closely with the Ministry of Agriculture, The Central Bank of Nigeria and the Ministry of Finance to further improve the Agric sector.