Manufacturing companies have said they cannot access loans at the Central Bank of Nigeria’s five per cent lending rate under its intervention scheme for manufacturing and other critical sectors. According to them, the loans have structural framework problems and are almost never accessed in banks at five per cent. They added that banks were more open to giving manufacturers loans at their official market rates. Speaking with the PUNCH, the Chairman of Manufacturers Association of Nigeria’s Electrical/Electronic sectoral group, Mrs Ijeoma Oduonye, said efforts made by her firm towards accessing the intervention funds through one of its designated commercial banks had proved abortive. She said, “Before now, we tried to work through one of the banks, but it didn’t materialise, now we are talking with another bank. It is a sector intervention fund that was going for nine per cent before but now they brought it to five per cent. But we as a company have not accessed it because the commercial banks, we wanted to process it in could not process it. “I do not understand the details from their end. I don’t know the regulation between the bank and the CBN. But the bank told my firm they won’t be able to process it.
