Despite the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Nigerian banking industry is still resilient and strong to support the country’s economy, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor, Godwin Emefiele, has said.
Mr Emefiele who spoke at the end of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting in Abuja, on Tuesday, said the various interventionist activities of the apex bank helped to significantly mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on businesses and households as well as reduce the level of contraction in the economy.
The Nigerian economy grew at about 1.87 per cent in the first quarter of 2020. However, following the outbreak of the pandemic and its devastation of the global economy, analysts projected the Nigerian economy to contract by about 7.4 per cent in the second quarter.
The gross domestic products (GDP) report published by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) early this month put the contraction at -6.1 per cent.
“The impact of the CBN interventionist activities has been positive, without which the positive GDP growth recorded in the first quarter of the year prior to the pandemic would not have been possible, neither would the somewhat reduced contraction of the economy to -6.1 per cent in the second quarter against projections of over -7.4 per cent have been possible,” Mr Emefiele said.
On the back of the pandemic, the CBN governor said the apex bank decided to rebase the interest rates on all CBN intervention facilities from nine per cent to five per cent for one year to help people and businesses devastated by the crisis.
Also, he said, between N500,000 and N1.5 million was made available from about N100 billion targeted facility set aside for households and small and medium enterprises (SME), apart from an additional N100 billion provision for large companies in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors for research and procurement of drugs for the new coronavirus.
He said all the interventionist activities were part of the efforts by the CBN to find ways to reflate the economy to enable people who lost their jobs and companies not able to pay their workers’ salaries to come back to business and survive.
