In a bid to support Nigeria’s creative industry and Cash Crops, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and banks, under the auspices of the Bankers’ Committee, have pledged to start payout of single-digit loans to these industries up to the tune N200 billion.

The Director, Banking Supervision Department, CBN, Mr. Ahmed Abdullahi, said this Thursday at a media briefing at the end of the Bankers’ Committee meeting in Lagos.

Speaking on the increased FPIs inflows, Abdullahi said: “The Bankers’ Committee noted that lending to the private sector and the economy has increased and that is very positive news. Also confidence by portfolio investors has also increased. Between January and March despite the issue of the elections, $6 billion came in and that is positive news.”

Mr. Herbert Wigwe, Group Managing Director/Chief Executive of Access Bank, also told Journalist that the committee would commence payout of funds for the creative industry.

His words: “At the Bankers Committee, we got the approval to take it to the next level, which is simply to do a final presentation and share it with the market and how it’s going to happen. So by next week there will be announcement for people who want to participate in each of these segments.

“The specific amount will depend on which of the strata you fall into and what you are doing. The loans are for a maximum of 10 years, they are single-digit interest rate loans and reflective of the fact that in these industries, what you require is long term financing at single-digit; while we will ask for collateral it will be flexible,” Wigwe added.

Also speaking was, the Managing Director of the United Bank for Africa Plc (UBA), Mr. Kennedy Uzoka, who said “the committee believes that we really haven’t made so much progress in this direction and subsequent to that, the committee set up a sub-committee and the sub-committee of members are those who have operated in continents where export have done very well. We have seen some countries that have similar products and have excelled in exporting while we have dropped.

“So, the question is, what are these countries doing that we are not doing? What are those things that are challenging us as a nation to diversify our economy from the standpoint of exports?”

He further added: “We interrogated this and worked with the different agencies of government across the continent and also we came back home to check what they have and we found out that indeed we have a lot of policies, but the challenge have been execution and we narrowed this down to seven broad areas.

“Typically, finance is one of the major challenges; we have policies, logistics -our ports don’t open weekends- and in terms of the policies that drive exports, we believe that a lot of them need to be changed.”

Uzoka explained that “fortunately, CBN has different types of funds, so we looked at the existing funds so we don’t reinvent the wheel and so we looked at which of the funding can address the current challenges.