The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Dr. Godwin Emefiele has said the Bankers Committee would carry out maintenance works at the National Art Theatre, Lagos, to the tune of N20bn.
He expressed the Bankers Committee’s appreciation to President Muhammadu Buhari for approving the improvement and redevelopment of the theater.
The CBN Governor also disclosed that apart from renovating the main theater, four hubs in the areas of IT, fashion, music and Nollywood, would be built around it by the committee.
Emefiele made the disclosure while speaking to newsmen at the end of the 11th session of the Bankers Committee meeting in Ogere, Ogun State on Saturday.
He said: “Asides from the redevelopment of the National Theatre, four hubs will be built around it, which will be developed and funded by the Bankers Committee.
“These four hubs are IT, fashion, music and Nollywood.
“Bankers Committee itself has its own funds that it has set aside; nothing less than N20 billion is going to be spent to carry out the maintenance.
“Not just the development of the hub but also, develop interest.
“This will help create economic activities around the National Art Theatre and then present it as an opportunity to create jobs for people, particularly our youths.’’
He assured that there were no plans to sack staff members of the national theatre.
“However, we will work with them and put in place the maintenance culture and arrangement that will make the national theatre and the hubs around it a tourists’ attraction.
“I repeat, we had attended different conferences in different parts of the world, the potential that the national theatre possesses is more and better than some of the conference centres we saw in different parts of the world.’’
He lamented that a large population of the Nigerian youth, with various innate skills were jobless because of lack of opportunities.
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He stressed that the renovated National Theater would offer opportunities to such youths and solicited the people cooperation with the committee so that, through it, jobs could be created and economic activities boosted.
The apex bank’s governor also debunked speculations that the Theater was to be sold, wondering why the government would contemplate selling “an asset that has the creative potential to generate massive revenue for the government.”
Speaking on the bank’s efforts at delivering digital growth, Emefiele said the bank was working to capture those not yet captured in the BVN as well as move it to the next level.
“We now have about 40 million people on the BVN platform.
“We think that because of the benefits of the BVN to bank customers and the economy, there is the need to consolidate and move it to a new level, something like BVN-2.0.
“This will entail, for instance, to reclassify and segregate transactions that can be done on BVN.
“We have two classifications; the existing BVN that we have in the system has about 18 lines of information.
“We decided that we classify into BVN-premium and BVN-lite.
“There should also be a system where people who are financially excluded can now be included.
“If you are on BVN-lite, there is a limit to the kind of transactions you can do in terms of deposit and in terms of loans.
“The important thing is that we want to make you financially included where you can conduct basic banking service.
“Our people in the rural communities who have BVN-lite will later be migrated to basic,’’ he said.
The theme for the meeting was: “Delivering Inclusive Growth: Leveraging Digital Finance”.
