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18 — Vanguard, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2019
THE Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN,
under the leadership of Governor
Godwin Emefiele, has stood out as not
just the major backbone, but also a
flagship of President Muhammadu
Buhari’s economic policy recovery
efforts.
While the nation had waited in vain
in 2015 for the Buhari administration
to launch its blueprint towards rescuing
our rapidly plunging economy, it
took the Anchor Borrowers’ programme
of the CBN introduced in
November that year to stimulate the
agricultural sector, resulting in the massive
rekindling of the interests of Nigerians
in farming. The result is a near
self-sufficiency in poultry products and
the resurgence in local rice production
and investments in other agricultural
sectors.
While inaugurating the first retreat for
his newly-appointed ministers in Abuja
on August 19, 2019, Buhari had boasted
that his government would, after eight
years in power, lay the foundation for
CBN’s laudable pact with NIPOST
lifting 100 million Nigerians out of
poverty, though he did not disclose the
policy roadmap for achieving such
ambitious plan.
A new scheme being put together by
the CBN to ensure the financial
inclusion of millions of unbanked
grassroots Nigerians could be a major
catalyst towards achieving the Buhari
administration’s objective.
In April 2017, the CBN had
established the Agric-Business Small
and Medium Enterprises Investment
Scheme, AGMEIS, in conjunction with
the Bankers’ Committee, and instructed
the Deposit Money Banks to contribute
five per cent of their annual profits after
tax as their equity investment in the
scheme.
In collaboration with the Bankers’
Committee, the CBN’s Nigerian
Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System
for Agricultural Lending, NIRSAL, will
set up a microfinance bank in conjunction
with the Nigerian Postal Service,
NIPOST, to take financial inclusion to
the 774 local government areas.
While inspecting the offices of the
NIRSAL Microfinance Bank in Abuja,
Emefiele said there would be six other
branches in Enugu, Ibadan, Port
Harcourt, Kaduna, Bauchi and Lokoja,
which will expand to 50 branches in the
second phase.
Through the branches of the NIPOST,
the Microfinance Bank will advance
credits to farmers and people involved
in agribusiness using only their farms
as collaterals for the loans.
If this scheme is properly and
professionally implemented, it will
leverage on the abandoned NIPOST
offices throughout the country to take
financial services down to areas where
they never existed because
microfinance banks, which were forced
by circumstances to operate more like
commercial banks, had to restrict their
services mainly to urban areas.
It will not only empower the
grassroots, it will also go a long way in
reversing the rural-urban drift, create
millions of jobs at the grassroots and
enhance the security of our rural
communities with the presence of ablebodied
youth.
We call on the CBN to press ahead
with this scheme and drive it to resounding
success. We fully endorse it.
OPINION
WNTV at 60: A future trapped in the past
BY BANJI OJEWALE
WHAT Premier ObafemiAwolowo’s
Western Nigeria government did in
Ibadan on October 31, 1959, was a long throw
into the ages ahead of his era. Establishing a
TV station, the first in Africa, was part of a
bigger picture Awolowo designed to engage
and honourthe distant, seemingly indistinct
future still to land.
An uncompromising believer in human
capacity exploration, Awolowo would always
put man, the ordinary person, at the centre of
his plans for the present and the future. What
better way to celebrate the citizen of the state
and make them ready for the future than to
free them from illiteracy and ignorance
through mass education? So, in 1955, only a
year after he became premier of the Western
Region of Nigeria, Awolowo injected free
education into the system.
Now, if for him education of the masses was
an ideological expression or projection of an
enterprise he was undertaking on behalf of the
people and the future, there must be a strategic
‘companion’ outside the traditional classroom.
Let the teachers do their work in the schools;
let the young boys and girls learn what’s
imparted to them, all within a confined
ambience.
But let there be also an ‘extended’ ambience,
so that after the limited school hours, more
‘learning’ and information dissemination
would continue in various forms: propagation
of government policies, cross pollination of
views, news about local and international
happenings, etc. Among many proposals that
came Awolowo’s way as he looked for what to
bring on board to aid the education of the
masses was the mass media. He picked the TV.
He told the Western Region House of
Assembly that his government needed a
medium that would serve ‘’as an educational
tool for the masses”. His government, with
Anthony Enahoro as information minister,
wanted, in addition, a ‘’medium to beam local
culture, foreign news and aims of the
government to the homes of people in the
region”. An exhaustive debate on the Bill to set
up a TV station was said to have taken place
among the lawmakers, at the end of which the
administration’s request, Western Nigeria
Television, WNTV First in Africa, was
approved, with the first broadcast coming up
on October 31, 1959.
So the purpose of WNTV, Ibadan, was
ideological, to drive the mass education policy
of the government, to deliver the people from
feudal plagues of backwardness and position
society for a fiercely competitive future. That’s
the chief aim of the media.
But these days we tend to romanticise this
history. This attenuation has miserably led us
to waste time on the crudities of the history of
WNTV: Who was the first female face on the
screen? AnikeAgbaje-Williams or Julie Coker?
Who was the first male face?Kunle Olasope,
who died recently, or the other one behind the
scenes? Who first read the Yoruba news on
WNTV?
But more serious-minded observers say this
argument isn’t what we should be discussing
as we mark the 60th anniversary of an event
that snatched Nigeria from the backwaters of
civilization and placed us ahead of some of
the developed societies of the Western world.
It serves no benefit if I have to ‘celebrate’ a
past whose early promise of greatness in the
future was aborted by the military junta of
Olusegun Obasanjo in 1976. A contemporary
chronicler has written that although ‘’during
this period (the days of WNTV) there was little
measurable statistics, but the station played a
pivotal role” to make Western Nigeria the bride
of the federation. At Independence in 1960,
and in the years that followed, WNTV was
indexed as the proof of what you would get if
you practised a genuine federation, where
every region ran (or stagnated) at its own pace.
WNTV, with its radio arm, WNBS, gave the
country its golden age in recognition of TV
(the media) as an indispensable adjunct to
socioeconomic and political engineering; the
same way Nigeria’s post-Independence season
from 1960 to 1966 offered us true federalism.
The soldiers’ putsch in January 1966 halted
the phenomenal progress the regions were
making independent of the centre.
The command administration they
At Ibadan, where the legend
of WNTV started, there is an
illusion: NTA, Ibadan, First in
Africa! WNTV was the First in
Africa, not NTA
introduced to ‘unify’ a federal arrangement
has rather broken us into shards we can’t
handle as they repeatedly bruise our fingers.
We are a brittle lot on account of our distorted
‘federal’ system.
We are the butt of doomsday prophets whose
pastime is to see us dismember at ballot times.
It’s the reason there is now a clamorous call
nationwide for the restructuring of the polity,
for the return to the regional system, when
centrifugal administration gave birth to
Nigeria’s Renaissance Age, part of its story
being WNTV.
The narrative can’t change as we mark the
60th anniversary of WNTVFirst in Africa,
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which was overrun and outlawed into
extinction by the Nigerian successors of the
ancient Barbarians who sacked the Roman
Empire in the 5th Century. We mustrecall
WNTV into its future. It is in line with the mood
of the season. Are Nigerians not also seeking
to restore Nigeria to its original functional
status? The military sacked WNTV and
replaced it with Nigerian Television Authority,
NTA. At the site at Agodi, Ibadan, where the
legend of WNTV started, there is an illusion:
NTA, Ibadan, First in Africa!WNTV was the
First in Africa, not NTA.
The establishment of the media house on
October 31, 1959 was emblematic of the
progressive Western Nigerian government
which served notice that it was poised for a
future to be numbered among global leaders
using only its territorial resources, chiefly its
citizens.
You can’t delete such a monument from
history. It should also be acknowledged, above
all else, that what we’re honouring isWNTV
coming into existence 60 years ago,not an
amorphous or broad celebration of 60 years
of TV in Africa. Let’s feast on that history first.
Octogenarian Jide Akinbiyi, the revered
pioneer news editor of WNTV, argues that any
celebration of the anniversary of the station
without an agitation for a restoration of the
name WNTV First in Africa, is ‘’incomplete”.
He has also insisted that WNTV as a pride to
Nigeria must be returned to its owners.
I add that after NTA has given way, the
building that housed WNTV needs be made to
recapture its old form and be transformed into
a museum where, under a restructured
Nigeria, tourists from within and without
Nigeria would visit and stand in awe before
history. That’s how we can rescue the trapped
future of WNTV First in Africa.
•Ojewale, a social commentator, wrote
from Lagos