Editorial- NIRSAL should face its core mandate

Activities of the Nigeria Incentive Risk-based Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL) in the agricultural value chains have of recent, become a thing of concern as the organization has deviated from its core mandates and has been meddling in financial and agronomics activities that are outright contradictions to its core mandate as an institution established to ensure access to funds by farmers and others in the value chain by de-risking the process.

NIRSAL is an initiative of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), The Bankers committee (BC) and Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD) incorporated as Public Limited Liability Company (PLC) and licensed as a non-bank financial Institution tasked with primary mandate of facilitating the flow of credit to agribusiness value chain players and collaborating with stakeholders to fix broken agricultural value chain in Nigeria.

The current play outs from this organization is revealing total deviation from its mandate as cases of inputs’ procurement and mis-prescription countering researchers and scientists’ recommendations of best agronomics to farmers were being reported and observed, with wheat farmers as cases in point where poor performance of production was reported.

 Also noted is the direct involvement in financial matters rather than allowing the real financial institutions to play their roles, to the extent that NIRSAL now plans to establish its own microfinance bank!

During the GESS 2012 the inputs and agro dealers were given NIRSAL support to get loans but what happened later was that its officials dabbled into procurement and disbursement of inputs. We have even heard of the organisation sending staffs on spurious training programmes abroad thereby spending resources that would have been better channelled to other more priority purposes for the scientists in agronomics or for bankers towards better strategy to lending to farmers rather than NIRSAL doing it by itself without impact on end users.

In our own view, this organization should have embarked  on training activities to financial and insurance institutions towards having better agricultural desks to ensuring  better access of funds to the stakeholders in all the value chains of the sector rather than being an actual actor, a  move that has been earning them discredit so far.

We have no doubt on the importance and great impact this organization can positively impact on financial situation for agricultural sector in Nigeria through easy access to funding to all the players in the sector, but its house must be put in order to reflect the mandate of the organization without  interfering  in other sectors’ mandates.

Come to think of it, how many of the farmers’ groups or any other stakeholders at the value chains have accessed fund from any commercial and micro finance institutions through de-risk mandate of the organization in the last four years. This is what should be of more great concern to NIRSAL as evidence of measurement and credibility to its mandate.

Many farmers’ organization have severally criticised the tossing-up- and -down they experience in the hands of NIRSAL in the name of giving loan that never come to pass.

The recent very low performance in the wheat production really called for concern and the need for appropriate quarters to let NIRSAL know their mandate boundary by leaving the work of researchers and financial institution to them while they should continue intensifying the derisking of agricultural sector to an enviable state for the players to have access to loan facility in any of the micro and commercial banks.

This wakeup call must be seen in the light of better repositioning of the agricultural sector to meeting the drive of the FG towards making agriculture an enviable profession that will have easy access to loan facility for more wealth and jobs creation to all and sundry in the country.