Stakeholders are worried that various Federal Government agric loan schemes are being hijacked by people the programmes were not meant for. They have urged the government to intervene to save the industry, DANIEL ESSIET reports.
It has been a season of agrarian discontent as various farmers’ groups have expressed concerns that agricultural loans and schemes introduced by the Federal Government to support the industry are being hijacked by people they’re not meant for.
These include: Nigerian Incentive-Based Risk Sharing in Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL), Commercial Agriculture Credit Scheme (CACS), Agricultural Credit Guarantee Scheme Fund (ACGSF), Agricultural Credit Support Scheme (ACSS)Multi-Channels Agricultural Finance Scheme (Multi-CAFS), among others. It has been sordid tales from farmers nationwide.
Scores of applicants for the Federal Government proposed agricultural loan through the Central Bank of Nigeria) (CBN) have cried foul over alleged cases of fraud, extortion of farmers and the listing of ghost beneficiaries for the loan.
While in some cases guidelines were violated, in others, bank officials were accused of siphoning off funds meant for the scheme.
Speaking in Lagos, a former Chairman, Agric Group, Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Prince Wale Oyekoya said the process of administering loans to farmers has been adjudged faulty. In some cases, he said many of the applicants and cooperatives involved are ghost beneficiaries and political farmers intending to use the loans for non-agricultural purposes.
Investigations, according to him, showed that most of the applicants, were identified as not having visible farms, saying loans were given to many ineligible people while those eligible were denied.
He added that a lot of funds, including loans and grants, such as the N200b CACS scheme in 2007, $3billion by USAID in January 2013, World Bank’s $300,000, should have made the country self-sufficient in food production rather than depending on importation, adding that a big chunk of the money was embezzled.
Oyekoya said: “Our commercial banks need to be restructured and mandated to fund real farmers and not political farmers. No farmers can survive on the current commercial interest rate of 26 per cent. The agriculture sector accounted for less than one per cent of the portfolio of banks.’’
He said farmers were closing up their farms because of inconsistent government policies, policy somersault, lack of funds, high cost of feed materials and poor infrastructure.
“The government has over the years formulated good agricultural and financial policies meant to encourage food production but such policies have been found inefficient and ineffective since the intended results were not realised,”Oyekoya said.
According to him, one of the defining characteristics of agriculture is the seasonality of income.
He said: “Farmers face most of their costs at the beginning of the season. That’s when they buy seeds and fertiliser, hire field hands, and prepare fields for cultivation. But they won’t reap the fruits of their labour until harvest, at least a few months away.” He lamented that despite the funds made available by the government, farmers are still not able to take loans from banks at the beginning of the season.”
Oyekoya said though the Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk-Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL) and the Bank of Agricultural (BOA) facilities were with good intentions, most fish farmers do not get loans through them. Most loans, he added, are from commercial banks with high interest rates.
