Naira crashes further at official market

 

On Tuesday, the Nigerian Autonomous Foreign Exchange Market (NAFEM), which is the official window, saw a further depreciation of the naira to N1,482.57 versus the US dollar.

The naira continued to fall at the end of trading, down 9.93 percent from the N1,348.63/$ posted on Monday.

Before closing at N1,482.57, the dollar saw trading as high as N1,531 and as low as N789.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) said hours ago that it has completed paying airlines for all confirmed foreign exchange (FX) claims, and an additional $64.44 million has been distributed to the relevant international aviation companies. This marks the Tuesday closing rate.

This followed the disbursement of $61.64 million to foreign airlines through various commercial banks as revealed by the financial regulator on January 7, 2024.

Hakama Sidi-Ali, CBN’s acting director of corporate communications, said the latest amount paid to the airlines brought the total verified sum disbursed to the sector to $136.73 million, stressing that all the verified airline claims have now been cleared.

She said Olayemi Cardoso, the CBN governor, and his team are committed and would stop at nothing to ensure that the verified backlog of payments across all other sectors is cleared and confidence restored in the Nigerian FX market.

Abujapress reported that, on January 29, 2024, the bank released $500 million to various sectors to address the backlog of FX transactions.