Lawmakers at the House of Representatives
Chairman House Committee on Nutrition and Food Security, Hon. Chike Okafor, on Tuesday, threatened to issue a bench warrant of arrest to the Managing Director of the Bank of Agriculture (BOA), Ayo Sontinrin, the Director-General of the Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria (ARCN) Dr. Abubakar Adamu Dabban and should they fail to appear at the investigative hearing by the Committee into the alleged misuse of N1.2 trillion agriculture funding.
He recalled that the Committee held its maiden Investigative Hearing on 8th April, 2025 with the Central Bank of Nigeria delegation in attendance. This is as the 2nd Hearing was held on 16th June, 2025 with the attendance of Central Bank of Nigeria and the Participating Financial Institutions (PFIs) still indebted to CBN under the Anchor Borrower Programme.
The lawmaker stated that Sterling Bank’s representative absorbed the bank from any indebtedness to which the CBN responded through a letter to the Committee dated June 25th, 2025 to affirm the position of Sterling Bank that it does not have any outstandings.
He said: “As the investigations went on, including forensic auditing and evaluation, few organizations have proven their innocence by honoring the invitations of the Committee, appearing before the Hearings, opening up their books with details answers to our inquiries and going extra miles to show verifiable evidences to support their claim of non-involvement in misuse of agricultural funding. Such organizations will be commended in the Committee’s Report to the House, at the end of the investigations”.
“On the other hand, the Committee wants to put it in the public know, that series of letters and invitations Isaac sent out to the
following: the Bank of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria, National Agricultural Land Development Council to appear before at the last two Hearings of this Committee, were met with either no response or very flimsy excuses for non-attendance. This is totally unacceptable. The Bank of Agriculture only responded with the excuse of having a new Managing Director and I wrote back to the MD to say, that the bank is an ongoing concern, that having a new MD is not enough reason not to honour the invitation of this panel.
“I sincerely hope that the Bank of Agriculture and the Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria will be present tomorrow because the public hearing continues tomorrow. We are not the police but this a quasi-judicial institution. If we don’t see them tomorrow, we would have to invoke all the powers of the parliament to make them appear before us”.
Meanwhile, the Committee discovered discrepancies in the testimony of the Isaac Inwang, the Managing Director Prospect Micro-Finance Bank of one of the invited DFIs, Iwang had told the Committee that Prospect MFB received N14.653, 379 million from CBN as loans for poultry farmers, adding that 30 farmers were given loans from the money but only N6 million had been recovered from the farmers. According to Inwang, his bank is yet to pay the CBN the recovered figure of N6 million after three years because the apex bank didn’t respond to letters from his bank seeking permission to re-invest the money or to send it back to CBN.
In response, a Deputy Director with CBN, Hassan Tom, described the presentation by Inwang as misleading, insisting that the guidelines for loans under the Anchor Borrowers Scheme clearly states that recovered money should be immediately paid to CBN.
Earlier, the Committee cleared the National Agricultural Seed Council after the agency’s Director-General, Fatuhu Mohammed, told the panel that the agency didn’t receive any kind of funding for the agricultural programmes or schemes being probed.
