The CBN says only N503 billion or 52.39 of loans it disbursed under the Anchor Borrowers' Programme (ABP) had been repaid as the few gains of the scheme are being eroded by multiple factors
On a Monday morning in July, Usman Muhammad was in a magistrate courtroom adjusting and readjusting his belt as he waited for a judge to deliver his prison sentence in Birnin-Kebbi, the capital of Kebbi State. in the state. But, according to prosecutors, he failed to repay the loan he collected six years ago. The ABP guidelines stipulate that upon harvest, benefiting farmers are to repay their loans with produce to an anchor, who pays the cash equivalent to the farmer’s account.
By 2022, at least 4.8 million people had benefitted from the ABP, authorities said at the unveiling of stacked paddy rice pyramids produced by rice farmers under the ABP initiative. “We find it very difficult to recover this loan,” Sahabi Augie, the immediate past Chairman of the Kebbi State chapter of the Rice Farmer Association of Nigeria , told PREMIUM TIMES.“Now in every magistrate you go, we have given the list of farmers to recover the loan. The drive for loan recovery is now in the court.
Interestingly, the All Farmers’ Association of Nigeria seemed to tilt towards the IMF when, in December 2022, it said the CBN was having difficulties recovering the loans because most beneficiaries of the ABP were not Nigerian farmers. Joe Aiki, the permanent secretary of the Kebbi State Ministry of Agriculture, said that “farmers just simply refused to pay and we don’t know the reason.
This point was corroborated by Yunusa Yabwa, the national secretary of the All Farmers Association of Nigeria , when he told Businessday that the loans under ABP were not disbursed adequately, hence the difficulty in ensuring repayment. Rice – like wheat-based foods such as bread and noodles – is one of the most popular staple foods in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. The country’s national rice consumption is 6.7 million metric tonnes per annum, according to the. However, by 2015 when the ABP launched, only about 3.7 million metric tonnes were locally produced with the remaining imported or smuggled into the country through porous land borders.
Some of the commodities, the bank said, include rice, wheat, cowpea, millet, maize, cotton, fish, soya bean, poultry, cassava, groundnut, ginger, sorghum, oil palm, cocoa, sesame, tomato, castor seed, yellow pepper, onions, and cattle/dairy.
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