The Naira, Nigeria’s currency, depreciated in value against the US dollar at the black market in the early hours of Wednesday and traded at N743/$1, indicating a slight depreciation of 0.13% from N742/$1 it traded on Tuesday.
According to information from black market traders on the market’s trend in the early hours of the day in review, the local currency, however, appreciated against the benchmark foreign currency at the cryptocurrency peer-to-peer (P2P) FX market by 0.02% to trade and exchanged at N746.57/$1 against N746.7/$1 it traded at the same time on Tuesday.
The Naira had closed at N441.25/$1 at the Importer & Exporter (I&E) official window on Tuesday, the same value it exchanged for on Tuesday.
According to official data, the amount of traded FX at the I&E window fell to its lowest level in the month of October, dropping by 33.2% to $46.21 million on Monday, from $69.18 million that exchanged hands last week Friday.
Similarly, the data reflected that Nigeria’s external reserve stood at $37.88 billion as of 14th October 2022, a decline of 0.06% when compared to $37.91 billion recorded the previous day.
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has been supplying dollars to FX traders at the official window and until recently, the Bureau De Change (BDC) traders in the past years to achieve some stability in the Naira exchange rate.
Despite the policy measure, the Naira has not galvanized in value as it had been trading at over N700/$1 over the past weeks in the parallel market as against the about N515/$1 it was trading before the withdrawal of FX supply by the apex bank to the BDC operators.
The apex bank discontinued the sale of FX to Bureau De Change operators last year following speculations that some of them were engaging in round-tripping of the dollars supplied them to meet foreign exchange needs of customers.
