By Gift Olivia Samuel, The Sight News
ABUJA: The Governor, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mr. Godwin Emefiele, has stated that the Bank is planning to extend its intervention to other areas of the economy, such as; Logistics, Food processing, Pharmaceuticals and even the Health sector.
It is a known fact, that the CBN in the last two to three years has focused primarily on Agriculture and a few select industries in the manufacturing sector, but that is about to change, with the extension plans hinted by the Governor.
Emefiele, who made this disclosure recently in Abuja, at the CBN Roundtable Session “Going For Growth 2:0”, stated that a large problem today is the delivering of food from farm to the market, which is why the apex Bank will be looking at intervening in whatever needs to be done, to move food and food products from farm to market.
He also said that the Bank will be intervening in areas that will help in improving processing of food from primary agricultural products.
Speaking on the impact of Coronavirus on the pharmaceutical industry, he revealed that the CBN will now begin to look at pharmacists and pharmacologists, to ensure that they begin to practice the formulation of drugs, development and establishments of pharmaceutical industries.
According to him, “Given the impact of Coronavirus, I hear some countries have even decided to ban the export of even pharmaceutical drugs out of their country. At this time, so what do we do as Nigerians?
“The CBN wants to put it on the table, to say yes, we will now begin to look at our pharmacists and pharmacologists, and say, that it is high time they stopped becoming dispensing people in hospitals, then they will now begin to practice what they really studied in school—the formulation of drugs and the development and establishment of pharmaceutical industries will now begin to play a major part in our intervention activities.
“We will also be looking at the possibilities for us to see to it that we reduce the drain of foreign exchange where we find people traveling abroad for common medical checks.
“We are going to intervene heavily in the health sector by trying to see how we could support the effort of government, to see to it that we develop specialist hospitals that can take care of diagnosis and also surgeries that would normally had taken our people out of the country and then a waste of our scarce foreign exchange resources”, he noted.
The one-day roundtable session addressed some of the measures needed to drive double digital growth rate in Nigeria; How to develop funding models that would support improvements in the quality of energy and transport infrastructure; and how Nigerians operating in the creative industries space, such as ICT, can expand and capture the value of their works, while creating jobs and generating export revenues for our nation.
