Guaranty Trust Bank has dragged no fewer than 60 top executives of 13 commercial banks to court as a pending suit between GTBank and Afex Commodity Exchange over N17bn Anchor Borrowers Programme loan lingers.

The 60 executives including the chairmen, chief executive officers, directors, and company secretaries of the 13 banks are facing contempt proceedings for allegedly failing to implement a No-Debit-Order reportedly placed on the accounts of Afex Commodity Exchange with the banks.

In suit no FHC/L/CS/911/2024 involving Guaranty Trust Bank Limited and AFEX Commodities Exchange Limited, the Federal High Court, Lagos division presided by Justice CJ Aneke signed an order for the bank chairmen, MDs, directors, company secretaries and the liquidator of Heritage Bank (Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation) to be committed to jail for failing to obey its May 27, 2024 ruling.

A legal notice titled ‘Order to serve notice of disobedience to order of court vide newspaper publication’ published in some national dailies on Thursday, partly read, “An order granting leave to the Plaintiff Applicant to serve Form 48 (Notice of Consequences of Disobedience to Order of Court) dated 11th June, 2024 and all other forms and processes that may be issued in this contempt proceedings inclusive of Form 49 on the 1st-60th parties cited for contempt

The matter was adjourned to next Thursday.

Parties cited for contempt include  Access Bank, Citibank, Jaiz Bank, Union Bank, Fidelity Bank, First Bank of Nigeria Plc, First City Monument Bank, NDIC (liquidator for Heritage Bank), Polaris Bank, Stanbic IBTC Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Taj Bank, United Bank for Africa and Zenith Bank alongside its principal officers.

In the court ruling dated May 27, 2024, twenty banks were directed to transfer monies standing to the credit of the respondent into the AFEX’s account with GTB until the N17.81bn is repaid.

The N17.81bn loans comprise N15.77bn; the amount outstanding and unpaid, as of April 17, 2024, and the cost of recovery and incidental expenses in the sum of N2.04bn.

The court also granted an injunction allowing GTB to take over AFEX 16 warehouses located across seven states and sell the commodities stored in them, which it said were procured with the Central Bank of Nigeria Anchor Borrowers’ loan facility.

Earlier in the month, the court had served contempt proceedings against AFEX and some of its principal officers including Ayodele Balogun, Jendayi Fraaser, Justin Topilow, Mobolaji Adeoye and Koonal Ghandi.

According to court papers, AFEX had sourced the Anchor Borrowers Programme Loan facility from GTB to provide finance for smallholder farmers registered under the CBN Anchor Borrower’s programme.

The loan was expected to be repaid from the sale of commodities. However, AFEX failed to uphold its end of the deal even after an extension.

In a statement following the interim court order, AFEX claimed that it had repaid about 90 percent of the loan facility.

“However, a portion of the loan remains outstanding with the farmers and while we have paid out a portion out of our own purse, we remain in discussions with CBN over the outstanding amounts of the said facility,” the exchange said.

It also said the full value of the loan was utilised to provide input to farmers in three consecutive seasons, starting in 2020.

The exchange added that it had remained consistent with repaying the loans until economic headwinds impacted the operations of the farmers that they had disbursed the money to.

“Over 800,000 hectares of farmland were financed through the course of the programme’s operationalisation; however, significant macro and policy headwinds, including the cash crunch on the back of the Naira redesign policy, severely impacted the productive capacity and market participation of the smallholder farmers in the 2022/2023 season.

“This resulted in less than 40 cent repayment from farmers on their input loan bundles, down from our 90per cent repayment rates in the previous eight years of providing input financing for farmers. The low repayment rate ultimately impacted on our ability to refund the full value of the loan at the end of Q1 2023 and following a 6-month extension period,” AFEX added.

The commodities exchange also stated that the lingering effects of the cash crunch have continued to impact farmers, who sold at below market value to get immediate cash inflows to sustain their families in the period and remain unable to pay back.

Meanwhile, AFEX has called on the Central Bank of Nigeria to activate the collateral guarantee of up to 70 per cent clause included in the Anchor Borrowers programme.

“Evidenced in the attached letters, our engagements with Guaranty Trust Bank Limited, a Participating Financial Institution in the program, as well as the apex bank have seen us highlight these limitations on the part of the defaulting farmers with suggestions being made to the CBN to activate the risk-sharing structure put in place for the program and release funds accordingly to sustain activities and allow for needed recovery efforts in our agriculture sector.

“In light of these engagements, we consider the recent steps by Guaranty Trust Bank Limited to be premature, coming in the midst of open conversations that are being had with all parties to find a path to resolution that does not unduly punish farmers, who have been the biggest hit by macroeconomic conditions that they had no control over,” AFEX concluded.

CBN at the inception of the programme in 2015 said the broad objective was to create economic linkages between smallholder farmers and processors to increase agricultural output and ensure food price stability.

The  Anchor Borrowers’ Programme guidelines stipulate that upon harvest, benefiting farmers are to repay their loans with produce (which must cover the loan principal and interest) to an anchor, who pays the cash equivalent to the farmer’s account.

By 2022, at least 4.8 million people had benefitted from the Anchor Borrowers Programme and the  CBN in a 2023 statement said it released N1.079tn  under the programme, out of which over N500bn is due for repayment.

The programme has since been discontinued by the CBN as it pivots from development financing interventions to its core duty of price and monetary stability.

Nigeria’s current economic issues, according to the presidency, are not President Bola Tinubu’s fault.

Bayo Onanuga, the president’s special adviser on information and strategy, claimed that Tinubu inherited the country’s economic woes in a statement released on Sunday in response to a New York Times article titled “Nigeria Confronts Its Worst Economic Crisis in a Generation.”

According to Onanuga, the report mirrored “the conventional predetermined, reductionist, disparaging, and dehumanising way foreign media establishments covered African countries for a number of decades.”

The spokesperson claimed that the publication only highlighted the negative experiences of some Nigerians during the previous year’s inflationary spiral and placed all the blame on Tinubu’s administration’s policies. The publication made no mention of the economy’s positive aspects.

“The report, based on several interviews, is at best jaundiced, all gloom and doom, as it never mentioned the positive aspects of the same economy as well as the ameliorative policies being implemented by the central and state governments,” Onanuga said.

“To be sure, President Tinubu did not create the economic problems Nigeria faces today. He inherited them. As a respected economist in our country once put it, Tinubu inherited a dead economy.

“The economy was bleeding and needed quick surgery to avoid being plunged into the abyss, as happened in Zimbabwe and Venezuela. This was the background to the policy direction taken by the government in May/June 2023: the abrogation of the fuel subsidy regime and the unification of the multiple exchange rates.”

Defending the decision to remove the petrol subsidy, Onanuga said it gulped $84.39 billion between 2005 and 2022 from the public treasury in a country with huge infrastructural deficits and in high need of better social services for its citizens.

He said the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited, the sole importer of petrol, had “amassed trillions of naira in debts for absorbing the unsustainable subsidy payments” in its books.

“By the time President Tinubu took over the leadership of the country, there was no provision made for fuel subsidy payments in the national budget beyond June 2023,” the spokesperson said.

“The budget itself had a striking feature: it planned to spend 97 percent of revenue servicing debt, with little left for recurrent or capital expenditure. The previous government had resorted to massive borrowing to cover such costs.”

According to Onanuga, to deal with the cancer of public finance on the first day, Tinubu had to end the subsidy regime and the “generosity that spread to neighbouring countries”.

Onanuga also added that the government was also subsidising the exchange rate as it was with oil in a bid to defend the naira against the “unquenchable demand” for the dollar.

The spokesperson said the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) spent an estimated $1.5 billion monthly to defend the local currency against the American greenback.

He said subsidising the exchange rate encouraged arbitrage as the gap between the official and parallel markets’ rates widened, and at the same time, the country was unable to fulfil its remittance obligations to airlines and other foreign businesses.

“Like oil, the exchange rate was also being subsidised by the government, with an estimated $1.5 billion spent monthly by the CBN to ‘defend’ the currency against the unquenchable demand for the dollar by the country’s import-dependent economy,” he said.

“By keeping the rate low, arbitrage grew as a gulf existed between the official rate and the rate being used by over 5000 BDCs that were previously licensed by the Central Bank. What was more, the country was failing to fulfil its remittance obligations to airlines and other foreign businesses, such that FDIs and investment in the oil sector dried up, and notably Emirate Airlines cut off the Nigerian route.”

He said the president’s administration also floated the naira to deal with the cancer of public finance.

However, Onanuga said stability is being restored in the foreign exchange markets since the naira depreciated to an all-time low of N1,900/$, although he acknowledged there are still challenges.

“The exchange rate is now below N1500 to the dollar, and there are prospects that the naira could regain its muscle and appreciate to between N1000 and N1200 before the end of the year,” added.

He also said the economy recorded a trade surplus of N6.52 trillion in the first quarter (Q1) of 2024, against a deficit of N1.4 trillion in Q4 of 2023.

Highlighting other positives from the reforms within Tinubu’s first year, Onanuga said portfolio investors have streamed in as long-term investors.

“When Diageo wanted to sell its stake in Guinness Nigeria, it had the Singaporean conglomerate, Tolaram, ready for the uptake,” the spokesperson said.

“With the World Bank extending a $2.25 billion loan and other loans by the AfDB and Afreximbank coming in, Nigeria has become bankable again. This is all because the reforms being implemented have restored some confidence.”

Onanuga said the inflationary rate is slowing down according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) data for April.

“Food inflation remains the biggest challenge, and the government is working very hard to rein it in with increased agricultural production. The Tinubu administration and the 36 states are working assiduously to produce food in abundance to reduce the cost,” he said.

“Some state governments, such as Lagos and Akwa Ibom, have set up retail shops to sell raw food items to residents at a lower price than the market price. The Tinubu government, in November last year, in consonance with its food emergency declaration, invested heavily in dry-season farming, giving farmers incentives to produce wheat, maize, and rice.

“The CBN has donated N100 billion worth of fertiliser to farmers, and numerous incentives are being implemented. In the western part of Nigeria, the six governors have announced plans to invest massively in agriculture.”

According to the special adviser, with all the plans being executed, inflation, especially food inflation, will soon be tamed.

Onanuga said Nigeria is not the only country in the world facing a rising cost of living crisis, adding that the United States is also experiencing a similar situation, “with families finding it hard to make ends meet.”.

“US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen raised this concern recently. Europe is similarly in the throes of a cost-of-living crisis. As those countries are trying to confront the problem, the Tinubu administration is also working hard to overturn the economic problems in Nigeria,” he said.

Onanuga said Nigeria faced economic difficulties in the past, and just as the country overcame them, the present difficulties will soon be quelled.

There are no #EndSARS protestors in any of the Nigeria Police Force’s (NPF) detention facilities, according to the NPF.

The force’s spokesperson, Muyiwa Adejobi, stated in a statement on Sunday that “nobody is being wrongly persecuted for participating in the EndSARS protest.”

Recall that, in October 2020, many young Nigerians demonstrated against the excesses of the police’s now-disbanded special anti-robbery squad (SARS) unit in various locations throughout the nation.

At the peak of the protests, some state governments declared a curfew to prevent a breakdown of law and order, while many protesters were arrested in cities such as Lagos, Rivers, and Ibadan.

Speaking at a dinner organised to mark 2024 Democracy Day on June 12, Shehu Sani, a former senator representing Kaduna Central, asked President Bola Tinubu to pardon #EndSARS protesters who are still in detention.

“Mr. President, there are some people who are still in detention as a result of EndSars’ protest. They were young people who were protesting for justice, freedom, and democracy,” Sani said at the event attended by Tinubu.

Responding to Shehu’s comment, Adejobi said, “All arrested individuals have been processed according to the law, and none remain unlawfully detained.”.

The force spokesperson said Babajide Sanwo-Olu, governor of Lagos, had pardoned over 100 suspects arrested by the police during the #EndSARS protest.

“The Nigeria Police Force categorically denies the recent allegations made by Senator Shehu Sani at the 2024 Democracy Day Dinner on June 12, 2024, at the Presidential Villa in Abuja, where the former Senator falsely claimed that some young people have been detained since the 2020 EndSARS protest,” the statement reads.

“For emphasis, no one anywhere in Nigeria is under police detention or being wrongly persecuted for participating in the EndSARS protest.

“The issues surrounding the protest have been debated, researched, and documented, and lessons have been learned. We have forgiven ourselves and moved on.

“We urge the public to disregard this claim and remain assured of our commitment to upholding justice, the rule of law, and human rights.

“We encourage verifying information before making public statements to avoid harm and incitement.”

However, the claim by Adejobi that no #EndSARS protester is in detention or being prosecuted for participating in the protest may not be entirely true.

According to The Cable, Dare Williams, a student of the Federal College of Education, Akoka, in Lagos, is currently at the Kirikiri medium prison for participating in the protest.

Williams was said to have been arrested on December 22, 2020, for allegedly posting a video showing a police officer covered in blood on his WhatsApp TV platform.

However, Williams is being tried for an alleged conspiracy to commit robbery