The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has advised small and large scale entrepreneurs in Akwa Ibom to take advantage of opportunities offered by its economic interventions to boost their businesses.
Its Director of Corporate Communications, Mr Isaac Okorafor, gave the advice during an enlightenment Fair organised by the state’s branch of the apex bank in Uyo on Tuesday.
Okorafor said that the programme was organised to sensitise the people to the bank’s various programmes aimed at sustaining the sector and the Nigerian economy in general.
The director, who was represented by Mrs Veronica Aqua, a director in his department, charged a cross section of entrepreneurs in the state to note that the bank, under the leadership of Godwin Emefiele, had put in place various initiatives aimed at powering and supporting Small and Medium Scale businesses.
According to him, the action is meant to improve the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), thereby improving the living standards of people.
“The governor of CBN in 2014 when he took over administration of CBN, promised to make the bank a people-oriented one.
“He wanted policies of the bank to be able to help put food on the table and also grow the economy.
“The bank introduced the Anchor Borrowers Programme for commodities such as rice, wheat, tomatoes, and others, to curtail the huge foreign exchange being spent on food importation.
“This policy has helped to create employment domestically.
“The bank initiated the policy of restricting foreign exchange for importation of 41 products in which the country has comparative advantage of producing domestically.
“These policies have yielded some positive results thereby helping to get the economy out of recession and restoring the economy on the path of growth,” he said.
Earlier, the Akwa Ibom Branch Controller of the bank, Mrs Ogbomon Paul, said that the fair became necessary as it appeared that most of the
interventions of the bank were not known to the public.
He promised that more sensitisation programmes would be carried out regularly for the benefit of entrepreneurs in the state.
“It’s like our intervention are not known; we should once in a while call you for sensitisation, but I promise you there is going to
be follow up on this,” she said.
The participants to the sensitisation programme were drawn from the 31 council areas of the state.
The participants, who were also informed of other interventions in the areas of manufacturing and SMEs, among others, were advised to avail themselves of such services from commercial banks in order to benefit from the various schemes in place.
