It appears there is a battle for who is to take the glory of who let the naira rise last week against the dollar. Billionaire Businessman Ifeanyin Ubah went on to social media to claim glory for the fall. In order not to seem ineffective, the CBN has also also now claimed the glory citing some of its actions as the reason for the fall.
This may seem like a joke but according to an article in the Nation, it certainly isn’t. Here is an excerpt of the article.
There are strong indications that the efforts of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to stabilise the naira may have started yielding results.
Feelers from two officials of the apex bank, who pleaded anonymity, indicate that the deployment of a number measures by the bank may have turned the tide in the foreign exchange (forex) market and led to losses suffered by currency hoarders and speculators.
The CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, accused speculators of conniving with bureau de change (BDC) operators to undermine the efforts of the bank at propping up the naira and warned that such speculators would eventually be punished by the market.
They even decided to name some policies that they claimed may have helped strengthen the naira. Again here is quoting straight from the article;
One is the decision to publish all forex sales from the inter-bank market to make for transparency. The second said the mop-up operations of the CBN, which had reduced the excess liquidity behind the high speculation of the upper week.
It’s sad this is what we have turned our forex policy into. The CBN is now fighting against perceived speculators and blame them for the continuous depreciation of the naira. Without empirical proof they believe that the value of the naira is N200.
