Naira slides to N745/$ at parallel market

Abubakar Yunus Abuja

The naira has depreciated further against the dollar at the parallel and official sections of the foreign exchange market.

Bureaux De Change operators (BDCs), popularly known as ‘abokis’, who spoke to TheCable on Monday afternoon in Lagos, quoted the naira at N745 to the dollar at the street market.

The figure signifies a depreciation of N5 or 0.7 percent from the N740 it traded over a week ago.

The street traders put the buying price of the dollar at N735 and the selling price at N745, leaving a N10 profit margin.

“Demand is fair. People are not rushing to buy dollars at the moment,” one BDC operator in the Victoria Island area of Lagos told TheCable.

At the official market, the local currency fell by 0.11 percent to close at N446.50/$ on Friday, according to details on FMDQ OTC Securities Exchange — a platform that oversees official foreign-exchange trading in Nigeria.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has continued to intervene in the official market to maintain the stability of the local currency.

An analysis of the CBN’s economic reports showed that the apex bank’s interventions in the forex market stood at $12.74 billion in the first eight months of 2022.

When compared with the same period in 2021, the interventions declined by 13.6 percent from $14.74 billion.

Last week, the apex bank announced a new policy which limits weekly over-the-counter cash withdrawals by individuals and corporate entities to N100,000 and N500,000, respectively.

Since then, the policy has generated mixed reactions from the citizenry.

Ahmadu Fintiri, governor of Adamawa, said the cash withdrawal policy was targeted at the political class and would further throw the country into poverty.