Obinna Odogwu, Abakaliki
The Assistant Director and Head of the Internal Communications Division, Corporate Communications Department of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mr Sam Okogbue, yesterday, gave insight into why the CBN withdrew foreign exchange support on 41 items imported from other countries and instead, established Anchor Borrowers Policy.
He said that the recession, which hit the nation’s economy in 2015, propelled the apex bank to embark on research on the situation and from its findings, discovered that the country lost over $1 billion annually importing items including food items that could be locally produced.
He said that this made the bankers’ bank to establish the Anchor Borrowers Policy targeted at boosting the rice production in the country which would in turn reduce unemployment, inflation, and increase the nation’s foreign exchange earnings through export of our locally produced goods.
Okogbue stated this in Abakaliki, Ebonyi State capital at the sensitization campaign of the bank tagged CBN Fair with the theme: Promoting Financial Stability and Economic Development.
Okogbue said: “You will recall that in 2015, our economy was in bad shape. We were not growing economically; that means what amount of goods and services we were producing in our economy was going down. What the economist call the recession.
“And if it is like that, unemployment will be growing. Inflation will also be rising. We discovered that all over the world, the prices of commodity prices were falling including the price of oil, which is our main export.
“We looked around. CBN began to find out. We discovered that even the foods we eat in this country were all imported. Not just being imported, huge sums of money to the magnitude of almost $1 billion were always spent yearly for the importation of rice. Even toothpick, matches were imported and unemployment was growing. First, the CBN came out with the policy that says these things which we can conveniently produce in Nigeria, whether food or other small industries, we can no longer give foreign exchange for people to import it. If you have the foreign exchange, go and import.