Loans facility: BOA takes hard stance on Associations

The Bank of Agriculture (BOA), Managing Director (MD)  Iwan Hassan has said that Associations will not partake in its  loans facility of N65 billion recapitalization, and another N5 billion for livestock, saying he would prefer individual farmers that are doing their agric business with genuine collaterals.

This was disclosed during a recently held press briefing held in Abuja last week where the former Agric Minister, Dr. Mohammed Abubakar has mentioned the recapitalization of BOA with N65 billions for agric business development in all the food value chains with N5 billion set aside for livestock alone.

Hassan during the questions and answers session of the press briefing told journalists that the loans are only opened to individuals, and not to associations, pointed there are rules and requirements to access the loans.

According to him " now individuals that do not belong to any association are free to come to the bank to take the loan. In fact we don’t intend to give any Association any money, we are giving their members, all the associations are going to do is just to introduce their members if they have them, otherwise, associations might not have a need. These are the requirements for giving out loans. We need to know who you are, we are giving individuals in associations, so if you don’t belong to any association, you can walk in to get the facility, it is for all Nigerians, its left for you to decide. The association is just for us to have introduction and be able to catch a large number of the society’’ 

BOA boss also pointed that the readiness to financing the  livestock  sector had actually started 2-3 weeks ago with about ten to twenty thousand customers already captured virtually  across the 110  branches of the bank.

He appealed to applicants to go to the nearest branch to obtain the application forms to complete the process, saying " You don’t have to leave Zaria to Kaduna, neither do you have to leave Tudunwade to come to Kano, or leave Ogbomoso and start going to Osogbo, we have branches in all these locations, so tell your members to go to all our branches to start up these process to access the facilities"