The nation’s foreign reserves have fallen by $990.98m this month, latest data from the Central Bank of Nigeria showed on Sunday.
The external reserves, which stood at $47.11bn at the end of last month, declined to $46.128bn on August 23, 2018.
A few days earlier, precisely on August 20, the reserves stood at $46.257 billion while on August 18, it grossed $46.373 billion.
The declining value of the reserves could be linked to the CBN interventions in the foreign exchange market as well as sluggish performance of the oil sector over the past few months. Although international oil prices have remained relatively stable, Nigeria’s oil output and supplies to the international oil market have not been optimal.
For instance, the apex bank had last Thursday and Friday, injected a total sum of $543.22 million and CNY 63.21 million into the inter-bank foreign exchange market.
At Thursday’s trading session, it offered the sum of $100 million as wholesale interventions and allocated the sum of $55 million each to the Small and Medium Enterprises, SMEs and invisibles windows customers respectively.
Also on Friday, the bank injected the sum of $323.22 million into the interbank retail Secondary Market Intervention Sales and sold CNY 63.21 million in the spot and short-tenored forwards, arising from bids received from authorized dealers.
Again, the last report by the NBS on the oil sector’s contribution to the GDP for the second quarter showed that in the Q2, 2018 overall GDP growth was constrained by the oil GDP, with crude oil and gas production contracting by -3.95 percent compared to 14.77 percent in Q1 2018 and 3.53 percent in Q2 2017
The CBN has over the years been attributing the changing national foreign reserves value to a combination of factors, including the changing pattern of international trade, institutional changes in the economy and structural shifts in production of the sectors.
