Entrepreneur tasks govt on measures to revive agric sector

…says banks should grant loans to SMEs in kind, not cash

Chief executive officer of Justy Confectionaries and Foods Limited and president of Imo Exporters’ League, George Ekeh, has tasked the three tiers of government in the country to as a matter of urgent national importance evolve stronger measures to resuscitate the ailing agricultural sector.

Ekeh, who is also the traditional ruler of Ishi Ubomiri Autonomous Community in Mbaitoli Local Government Area of Imo State, said the essence of reviving the ailing agricultural sector is not only for food security but also to provide employment opportunities to curb crimes and criminality in the country.

Speaking to Business A.M. in a telephone interview, Ekeh recalled that agriculture was the mainstay of Nigeria’s economy before every attention shifted to oil, cautioning that the continued deliberate neglect and rejection of agriculture could worsen the raging food crisis, deplete resources direly needed for development, throw the economy into catastrophe and increase juvenile delinquency in the country.

He said that governments at all levels need to realise that there is no other way the economy can grow without agriculture and small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) as they are little clusters of businesses that will build a huge economy like the economies of the Asian giants.

“There are many windows the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has created, such as Anchor Borrowers Programme. They have also acquired some of those facilities and asked the commercial banks to give but politicians hijack those things and use them to settle their boys and they don’t pay the counterpart funds that are required in getting these facilities through,” Ekeh said.

“And the banks at times are not smooth enough because they have a conscripted view about what you ought to do before you get this money: that you must run your account for a minimum of  six months or one year, you must have a million turnover and all that, and that must have kept some enterprises moribund,” he said.

He decried some challenges faced by farmers, exporters and agric value-chain enterpreneurs, advising the Central Bank to loosen up some processes to help farmers and producers in the agricultural value chain.

He lamented the post-harvest losses that farmers and businesses in the agriculture value chain encounter as some produce go bad in transit.

“We produce, we grow crops, we grow along the value chain, add something to the value-chain, process, and the banks think that when they are asked to give  loan, it becomes what the farmer or the entrepreneur is interested in, thinking that if you give them loan they will run away, so the banks are lazy to  do their jobs,” he said.

To hedge against bad debts or irrecoverable loans, Ekeh suggested to the banks thus: “If somebody asks for a million naira loan, you will find out where is the cash going. What does he want it for? So if he wants it for a grinding machine, then go and get a grinding machine for him and deploy it , you don’t give him cash. If he needs it for packaging, go and get a packaging company, pay them and you deliver to him. If he wants salary and all that, it can be properly arranged and the banks can pay staff salary directly, all you need to do is to sign a register, you monitor the expenses, the way the money is used.”

“But what they do is what has been happening all the years. If you give somebody a loan for agric, if you don’t follow up, the guy goes to build an estate, he will go to marry many wives, buy luxury cars because you don’t monitor him, and at the end of the day, he can’t pay back,  something (money) that has to come back in three months or six months will come back in five years because it was deployed to real estate and marrying of many wives. These are all the things. They have to re-draft the plan, they have to wake up everybody and look at the entrepreneurs that are not the Dangotes and all that, and help them.”