By Raphael Oshita
The Senate has threaten to order the arrest of the Managing Director of Bank Of Industry (BOI), Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL), and the Director General of Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN if they fail to honour their invitation in the next adjourn date.
The Senate Committee Probing the alleged ‘Uneven’ disbursement of loans to Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in the six geopolitical regions by the Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN) to the tune of half a trillion naira made the threat on Wednesday in Abuja.
The chairman of the probe panel, Senator Sani Musa lamented on the conspicuous absent of the five agencies at the two-day investigative hearing which commenced on Wednesday on the alleged ‘uneven’ disbursement of the N500 billion development fund without any former communication which is not acceptable.
He noted that out of the eight relevant government agencies needed for the investigation, five were invited to appear before the committee at the Wednesday session, but only two showed up, while the remaining three which are the CBN, BOI and NIRSAL, were conspicuously absent without any letter from them explaining why.
Sen. Musa commended theMD of DBN and his counterpart from the Bank of Agriculture who honoured their invitation in the Wednesday sitting and urged the CBN Governor, MD of Bank Of Industry and DG of NISRAL to appear before the Committee in subsequent sessions or risk being coerced through the issuance of a warrant of arrest.
“The Ministers of Finance, Zainab Ahmed, Trade and Investment, Niyi Adebayo and Humanitarian Affairs, Sadiya Umar Farouq, will appear before the committee on Thursday this week for submissions on roles played in the alleged ‘uneven’ disbursement of funds.
However, the Managing Director of DBN, Tony Okpanachi who denied deliberate lopsidedness in the disbursement of the fund, argued that the laid down procedure set by CBN were used for fund disbursement, adding, “Our lending has procedure and they are the same with the Central Bank of Nigeria.”
According to him, for a business to qualify for the DBN loan, it must have less than 250 employees and must not have done a turnover of more than N1.1 billion, said, “We do a risk assessment of the participating financial institutions (PFIs) before they begin to lend to businesses. We don’t want to give out money and the money fritters away. So we track the end users of the loans yearly.He says, the location of the registered MSMEs in Nigeria also explained the reason for the loan’s disbursement, adding that out of the registered MSMEs across Nigeria, Lagos alone has 25%, Southwest 23%, sought south 18%, Southeast 10%, North central 10%, Northwest 9%, FCT 4% and Northeast 2%. Okpanachi said DBN has asked participating financial institutions to build the capacity of small-scale businesses, and train them on how to structure their businesses for them to be able to access the loans, noting that, “For DBN, it’s a continuous process to get more businesses on board.
