Naira sells at N490/$1 on black market

Barely four days after the Central Bank of Nigeria adopted an autonomous foreign exchange (NAFEX) rate, naira value has depreciated at the black market, trading at N490/$ as of Friday.

While the naira appreciated at the importer & exporter (I&E) window by 0.1 per cent to N411/$1, it dropped by 0.4 per cent to N490/$1 on the parallel market.

The local currency has lost N9 or 2.3 per cent on the black market this week, according to data on abokiFX.com, a website that collates parallel rates in Lagos.

On Monday, CBN adopted the Nigerian autonomous foreign exchange (NAFEX) rate dropping the official market rate of N379/$1.

In November, the naira had hit N500 per dollar on the black market  after CBN announced the devaluation of the naira and urged Bureau de Change operators not to sell dollars higher than N392 to end-users.

But the CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, on Tuesday at the end of the monetary policy committee meeting, debunked the depreciation of the currency, saying that Nigeria still operates a managed-float exchange regime.

“The NAFEX, you see, it may be N410, N409 or N411, N412 or the next day 400, so it not fixed, but it is not floating. We are still running a managed- float exchange rate,” he had said.

Emefiele said, “This is because we are still monitoring the market. We are running a managed-float where we monitor the market to ensure the right things are happening for the good of the Nigerian economy.”

A managed float FX regime is when exchange rates fluctuate daily, but CBN attempts to influence the rate by buying and selling currencies to maintain a specific range.