The Governor, CBN, Mr. Godwin Emefiele,
who spoke during a tour of the project site on Sunday, said, “About two
and a half to three years ago, Alhaji Aliko Dangote actually came to the
banks. At that time, I was an operator, and he said he wanted to go
into fertiliser, petrochemical as well as refinery business.
“We started with the fertiliser side of
it; but today, these three projects are costing them about $14bn
(N2.8tn), out of which he is contributing 50 per cent. I have come here
to see so that I can also tell Nigerians that we need to give support to
people like Aliko Dangote for what they are doing for Nigeria. This is a
time when we are talking about diversifying our economy away from oil.”
Noting that the plants would produce
ammonia, urea, propylene, polypropylene and other petroleum products,
Emefiele said, “These are products that we today import into the
country. If we calculate how much the country spends on the importation
of these products into Nigeria, consuming foreign exchange, this stands
at close to 35 to 40 per cent of our import needs.
“We expect that by the time these
projects are completed, they will not only meet our domestic needs,
Dangote will be exporting these products to the point where he will be
selling foreign exchange to Nigerians and the Central Bank of Nigeria to
the tune of almost about $6bn a year.
“That is the kind of projects that we
think we should support, and we think we need to encourage more
Nigerians to begin to think like Aliko Dangote. If you have somebody who
has contemplated a project of $14bn and he is contributing 50 per cent
as equity into that project, we have to give him foreign exchange to
import the equipment. We need to support companies like this.”
Emefiele said before he became the CBN
governor, Dangote had come with a bill of almost $4bn for the
importation of the equipment.
According to him, the CBN told Dangote
to commit to the importation of the equipment and that the bank would
stagger the repayment and offer its support by providing foreign
exchange.
He added, “And that is what we are doing
and that is the kind of support we can give to people like this who are
contemplating moving Nigeria away from an importer of all these
products to an exporter.
“Indeed, we are not even selling $4bn to
Aliko Dangote. If he needs naira, we will give him naira at
concessionary rates. If he needs dollar to import the equipment, we will
do so because he doesn’t need raw materials by the time the projects
come on stream.”
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