In addition, savings mobilization at the grass-root level has been discouraged by the unrealistic requirements, by many banks, for opening accounts with them. The summary from the foregoing is that the Nigerian banking system faces enormous challenges which if not addressed urgently could snowball into a crisis in the near future. We don’t have to wait for the crisis to explode before we act.
We are reasonably confident that inflation will be quite modest for 1997 as a whole. The central tendency of the forecasts is that consumer prices will rise only 2¼ to 2½  BIS Review 70/1997  -8-  percent this year. This would be a significantly better outcome than the 2¾ to 3 percent CPI inflation foreseen in February.