Sabo Nanono, Nigeria’s new minister for agriculture, shares a connection with Mamman Daura and Abba Kyari from their time together at Africa International Bank (AIB).
Daura and Kyari are key figures in President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration. Daura is the president’s nephew and trusted adviser while Kyari is his chief of staff.
Nanono, Daura and Kyari all worked together at AIB. Nanono was the managing director/CEO, while Daura was the board chairman and Kyari was the company secretary.
AIB came unstuck after a surge in bad loans dented the lender’s asset quality even as it was embroiled in cases of financial mismanagement, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Although AIB’s banking licence was only officially revoked by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on September 2, 2013, the bank closed nearly eight years before, prior to the banking consolidation of 2005.
The Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC), as liquidator, commenced winding up of the affairs of the bank after the Federal High Court on March 20, 2015 issued the order to wind up the closed bank.
The liquidation didn’t mean the debtors of the bank were let off the hook. The NDIC said at the time that “all debtors of the closed bank are required to immediately effect payment of their debts”. It’s unclear how successful the process was.
The NDIC did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. A former staff of AIB said he didn’t feel “comfortable” talking about what happened at the bank during his stay. He recommended a colleague who did not immediately return two phone calls.
Nanono made it to a 43-man shortlist of ministers for President Buhari’s second four-year term. Nanono replaced Audu Ogbeh.
The Business Administration graduate, who says he has been in the agricultural sector since 1973, will be faced with the challenge of boosting growth in a sector beset by infrastructural challenges that have refused to go away and undermine the sector.
Bloody clashes between cattle herders and farmers in the North-Central and North-East regions of Nigeria have curtailed farming activities, even though growth in the sector picked up in the first quarter of 2019 to 3.2 percent, driven by improved crop production, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
Some stakeholders say the growth rate of the sector has remained subdued despite the support from the government.
On a yearly basis, the sector has been declining, moving from growth rate of 4.1 percent in 2016 to 3.45 percent in 2017 and 2.12 percent in 2018. Economists expect output in the sector to grow 3 percent by the end of 2019, higher than 2018’s figure but lower than the rate recorded during the recession-tainted 2016.
Under President Buhari, the agriculture sector has been a big beneficiary of government interventions.
Some of these interventions are the Anchor Borrower’s Programme, the National Fertiliser Initiative, and the de-risking of agricultural lending through Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL), with the assistance of the CBN.
In the second term, the government has made it no secret that it aims to take its efforts a notch higher in several ways. These include better provision of seedlings and access to finance for farmers to boost productivity, deepening of import substitution drive, strengthening of the capacity building arm of the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme to help support farming practices, and emphasising the need to link small-holder farmers to international buyers.
The CBN has said it will continue to support the interventions until the full potential of the sector is achieved.
As at March 15, 2019, the apex bank had committed a total of N171.35 billion in the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme, for instance, with active participation across the 36 states of the federation and the FCT. A total 920,788 have benefitted in the programme, cultivating about 960,643 hectares of land across the states and FCT.
“I am very much interested in agriculture and most people identify me with that,” Nanono said after he was confirmed by the National Assembly.
“Agriculture has been a sector that has been holding the economy and we need to work in synergy to move to agriculture to the next level,” the former AIB CEO said.
LOLADE AKINMURELE
