The Bank of Agriculture (BoA) plans to raise N200billion capital through public funding, Managing Director, Lead Capital Consortium, Dr Wale Adeoye, said at the weekend.
The bank’s recapitalisation will be completed in 14 weeks, its Managing Director, Kabiru Adamu, said.
Lead Capital Consortium is charged with the restructuring and recapitalisation of the bank.
According to Adamu, the bank has in the last two years recovered over N7billion debts.
They spoke at the headquarters of BoA in Kaduna during a meeting of the bank’s management with the consortium.
Adamu said the lender, established over 40 years ago, is facing challenges in staffing, as the workers had not been trained on modern agricultural finance system, debt recovery and infrastructural decay, hence the need to fund and restructure the bank.
Adeoye said upon completion of the restructuring of BoA in 14 weeks, the Federal Government will recapitalise the bank with over N10 billion and subseqently, the process will continue through public funding targeting about N200 billion.
He said: “The first funding will come from Federal Government, then the subsquent ones will be from the public.
“The objective of the gathering was that, the consortium has been tasked to provide financial advice and policy options as well that will support the Federal Government regarding the recapitalisation of BoA and also ensuring that good control governance is instituted in the bank.
“The bank is at the verge of receiving fresh capital, so it needs to really deal with issue of cooperate governance, so that there will be proper management of resources going forward.
“The second objective is also to have the BoA to catch up on the gaps it has in its operations. For instance, is still not having a licence as a bank. This will be sorted out, so that it is properly licensed by the CBN.
“Thirdly, it is planned that the capital to be injected into BoA will come from even the public. The first round will come from the government and then subsequently it will be open to the public and interested stakeholders.
“Having said that, we are very passionate on the mandate we are given to ensure that the project is completed within 14 weeks that we are told to do this exercise.”