…Says forex earnings into it dipped from $3bn to zero
The official foreign exchange receipt from crude oil sales into Nigeria’s official reserves has dried up steadily from above US$3.0 billion monthly in 2014 to an absolute zero dollars today, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Godwin Emefiele, has revealed.
He disclosed this at the 57th annual Bankers Dinner, organised by the Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria, CIBN, in Lagos at the weekend. He noted that the Nigerian foreign exchange market is in the middle of a serious crunch which are straining the reserves and stifling the value of the naira.
Market demand for both goods and ‘invisible’ transactions has continued to increase under various uses in the face of dwindling supply of foreign exchange.
According to him, the number of student visa issued to Nigerians by the UK alone has increased from an annual average of about 8,000 visas as of 2020 to nearly 66,000 in 2022, which implies an eight-fold surge to about US$2.5 billion annually in study-related foreign exchange outflow to the UK alone.
It is against the backdrop of the worsening mismatch between foreign exchange market demand and supply, and the need to boost foreign exchange earnings that the CBN and the Bankers’ Committee initiated the RT200 programme in February 2022, he said.
The programme, he said was fundamentally devised to innovatively tackle the fundamental problem associated with the repatriation of non-oil export proceeds.
On the National Domestic Card Scheme (NDCS), he said this is expected to lower operating costs for banks incurring huge charges for foreign card schemes. It will also reduce the huge foreign exchange commitments associated with operating foreign card schemes.
The scheme is expected to commence on January 16, 2023, he disclosed, adding that with this, Nigeria will join a growing list of Emerging Markets and Developing Economies (EMDEs), including India, Turkey, China, and Brazil that have launched domestic card schemes.
On e-Naira, he said so far, a total of N8 billion, consisting over 700,000 transactions has passed through the e-Naira platform.
