To encourage banks to give credit to the real sector of the economy, at single digit rates, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), has offered to complement the banks.
Speaking yesterday after the end the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) Meeting in Abuja, which saw the retention of all monetary rates, the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele said the mechanism was not designed to bring competition among Deposit Money Banks (DMBs), but to complement their efforts.
He said: “The most important thing is that we want to see to it that we achieve a single digit rate. We believe this will work because rather than the banks keeping the money in the reserves, they can key into this and promote these transactions as long as they meet the terms and conditions.
“A differentiated dynamic cash reserve requirement regime will be implemented to direct cheap long term bank credit at nine per cent and a minimum tenor of seven years and two years moratorium to the employment elastic sectors of the economy.”
He said details of the mechanism are being worked out by the banking supervision and the monetary policy departments and will be released very soon.
“MPC was concerned that credit to the economy was sliding and we looked at means to incentivise the DMBs to increase credit to the real sector,” Emefiele said.
The MPC was of the opinion that while it is difficult to encourage job creation in a deficit infrastructure environment, the committee believes the bank should continue to encourage DMBs to increase the flow of credit to the real sector to consolidate economic recovery.
To achieve this, Emefiele said two approaches were considered. The first, in order to achieve the objective of lowering interest rate particularly to those priority sectors- manufacturing sectors, agric sector, CBN will encourage large corporates to issue commercial papers/note to the market and there will be a memorandum that will detail explanations of what they are going to do with that money.