By Adedapo Adesanya
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is set to create 10 million jobs by the year 2025 as part of its commitment to improving national development and economic stability.
This was disclosed by the Director, Corporate Communications, CBN, Mr Isaac Okoroafor, in a statement in which he reiterated the bank’s commitment to national development.
He noted that the bank was hoping to create the 10 million jobs in the next five years, which he said will be done through 10 commodity models that the bank sees fit.
“This will be achieved through 10 commodity models carefully chosen by CBN management. They include cotton, cocoa, maize, dairy, palm oil, fishery, poultry, cattle, tomato and cassava,” he said.
It was also disclosed that that CBN would be giving out high yielding seedlings, fingerlings and other inputs to farmers as this will help yield better produce. He added that the welfare of farmers across the country was important to the bank and that had spurred some of the lender’s recent policies.
“As a way of assisting farmers, the CBN will provide anchor companies, who will buy off the products from the farmers, immediately after harvest. This will create the best value chain for the farm products,” he said.
Mr Okorafor pointed out that the CBN was embarking on bringing back farm settlements across the country as it used to be before as this would be the easiest way to build the nation’s economy.
He also said that the CBN wanted to stop inflation by controlling the rise of food prices and making credit facilities available at single-digit interest rate. Recently, the countries inflation for January had hit 12.13 percent, a rise that had been ongoing for over a year.
This is a further expansion in the bank’s policies to ease the effect on Nigerians which had introduced policies like review on financial transactions, increase of Loan to Deposit Ratio (LDR) to 70 percent, as well as supporting farmers in order to crash the price of farm and dairy products.
