Emefiele: CBN won’t make life difficult for banks

Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Godwin Emefiele, says the apex bank would continue to make regulations that would strengthen the nation’s banking sector “but will not make life difficult for the banks”.

Emefiele said this in Washington DC when he briefed newsmen on the outcomes of the annual meetings of the World Bank and IMF in Washington DC.

“The banks are practically financial catalysts and we know that we need to give them support.

“We need to encourage them. We need to do different things to encourage them to look at the direction we think will engender inclusive growth and job creation for our people.

“We have been in the forefront of ensuring that with strong regulations in Nigeria we will continue to strengthen those regulations to ensure that financial system stability is sustained.

“The fact that I said that we will strengthen regulation does not mean that those regulations will be targeted at making life difficult for the banks,” he said.

He said there would be regulations to strengthen the financial system such that the system would be able to witness any shock.

He said that the CBN would continue to take certain actions given some of the lessons it learnt in the course of the meeting.

Emefiele said that at the last monetary policy committee meeting there were discussions on how to support the banking sector to help the real sector of the economy.

He said the CBN would work out avenues to encourage banks to lend to the real sectors of the economy.

“We are talking about the manufacturing sector, agricultural sector and all that.

“You are also aware of some of the targeted interventions that we are involved in.

“We are trying to make sure that we direct people’s attention to areas that we think will contribute to inclusive growth and job creation in the economy.

“We will continue to do all those and we are pretty much optimistic that we are going to see positive results in the near future,” he said.