Emefiele
Godwin Emefiele
Economy

Lawmakers seek commission to coordinate monetary, fiscal policies

By aAdekoya
205
Desirous of a body to synchronise monetary and fiscal policies of the federal government, the House of Representatives Committee of Banking and Currency is seeking the establishment of a financial services commission.

The idea came on the heel of the country’s current economic realities which now calls for an improved collaboration between the Central Bank of Nigeria which formulate monetary policies and the Ministry of finance that is in charge of fiscal policies.

At an oversight visit to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) the Chairman, House of Representatives Committee on Banking and Currency, Jones Onyereri stressed that such commission would help stimulate growth in the economy.

“If we work on the monetary policy without an agreeing part on the fiscal side, then it becomes an issue. For us as a committee we are wondering if it necessary for us to set up a financial services commission where we will have monetary and fiscal authorities converge.

“We are trying to understand fully the operation of CBN and also get out of the economic quagmire. So far so good, the CBN has shown a very sound organisational prowess. But beyond all that, we have also made necessary observations which I believe they would look into in a bid to correcting just a few of them. It has been quite impressive and I am glad we have a good number of our colleagues that came out for this over sight visit. We hope that going forward, the country would really get out of this economic quagmire,” Onyereri stated.

Onyereri expressed concern over the rising non performing loans in the banking industry, just as he urged the central bank to ensure that the situation is brought under control.
He alleged that a substantial part of the NPLs was as a result of insider dealings within the financial system.
“We need to get a proper brief on it but looking at it critically, most of these NPL are insider’s abuse. So we should look at ways of punishing people especially the management of banks involved in all these because most of them go scot free and I think that should be the starting point in order for banks to do the needful,” he said.
Continuing, Onyereri called for increased lending to the real sector in order to stimulate growth in the economy.

“We were a little bit worried because of the increase in the monetary policy rate (MPR) to 14 per cent at the last monetary policy committee meeting. We believe as a committee, that, that was not the best decision. But having heard from CBN, we would still want to know what led them to that decision because for us, we were still looking at the bigger picture of still trying to grow the SMEs and we felt the only way you can grow the SMEs is to make credit accessible to them and that would not work out with very high interest rate.

“But we believe along the line we would able to create a perfect balance and also we looked at the issue of banking supervision, we would not want any bank to go down and we believe that CBN being the apex regulator would be able to improve particularly in the issue of banking supervision to make sure they put an end to insider abuse and a huge reduction in NPL.

“We also concluded looking at the issue of consumer protection because we have had reports of infractions in respect to transactions with depositors and we thought they should also look at it in order to put a stop to whatever infractions there are.

I believe we would be able to partner with the apex bank all geared towards improving our lots with respect to the national global outlook,” he added.

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