The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief Audu Ogbeh, has disclosed that farmers will hold 40 percent of total shares in the Bank of Agriculture (BoA) as soon as its ongoing commercialisation process is concluded by the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE).
Ogbeh listed the shareholding structure of the bank to include the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) which would own 10 percent of the bank, the Ministry of Finance 10 percent, and institutional investors 40 percent.
The minister gave these hints when he received members of the Senate and House of Representatives’ Committees on Agriculture and Rural Development, led by Senator Abdullahi Adamu and Hon. Mohammed Monguno.
While lamenting the ministry’s huge N6.70 billion overhead on its personnel in the 2017/2018 budget, Ogbeh explained that the ministry was unable to achieve 100 percent budget performance partly due to late releases of capital expenditure.
He explained: “The focus today is 2017/2018 budget performance. In 2017, we have a total release of N48, 140, 990, 891 billion. On capital we had a total release of N185, 933, 273 million; Overhead on the personnel was N6, 704, 856, 830 billion.
“We had releases in three tranches in 2017 in first quarter, second quarter, third quarter and fourth quarter as indicated because we inherited liabilities from GES in 2017, which was arriving from 2016, and the minister believed that that would impact negatively the ability to provide inputs for farmers to use a component which was budgeted in the budget to settle that liability.
“Our performance for 2017 was practically 100 percent of release. We had very serious issue with overhead as one of the largest ministries we have only N185 million for the whole year, which was just 40 per cent of what was proposed.
“We did pretty very well in 2017 but because the budget did not perform 100 per cent, and eagerness of the ministry, especially we have to address issues on import substation and value chain expansion and development, infrastructure development and other services, and then other agricultural projects”, the minister added.
In his remarks, the Senate Committee’s chairman canvassed collaborative initiative between legislature and executive to reduce delays in the release of funds and removal of agriculture from traditional budget as issues concerning agriculture is time bound.
