NAIRA HITS N400 AT STREET, STABILISES AT INTERBANK MARKET

Naira has hit another record low selling at N400 to a dollar at the Bureau de Change segment of the foreign exchange market.

Traders attributed the fall to the acute scarcity of foreign currency in the street market in the face of daily increase in demand.

 This week, the local currency depreciated against the greenback by about 8.2 percent, from the N370 a dollar at the end of last week.

Abubakar Sadiq, a trader in Lagos, said that at about 13:00 hours, a dollar traded at N400 in Lagos and Abuja, but dropped to N395 in the evening.

“Unless the CBN officially inject liquidity to the BDC market, we can’t sustain the demand”, he said.

At the interbank market, the local currency remained steady at about 310 and 315 a dollar since the beginning of the week due to the increases in supply and of the FX.

Meanwhile, brief relief came the way of equities investors, yesterday, as gains by some stocks pushed up the market value by N30bn to close the trading session on a positive note.

Even as market breadth closed negative with losing stocks outnumbering gaining ones, the market capitalisation closed 0.32 per cent higher than N9.531trn as the NSE All-Share Index (ASI) equally gained 63.54 points to close at 27,751.34 absolute points.

..Problems of manufacturing beyond forex liberalisation

The problems confronting the manufacturing sector of the economy are beyond the forex liberalisation policy recently introduced by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the Chairman of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), Abuja branch, Dr Wasilat Shittu-Titilola, has said.

Shittu-Titilola, who spoke during the association’s third annual general meeting held in Abuja, yesterday,

expressed his disappointment that key operating challenges facing the manufacturing sector have not been addressed.

“Despite relaxing the forex regime, the names of 41 items which are majorly raw materials, are still retained on the list of items that cannot access forex from CBN,” he said.

“Within the branch, some pharmaceutical and plastic manufacturing companies were forced to close down while several others had to cut down on their production and workforce.”

The Executive Secretary of the MAN, Abuja Branch, Sunday Okpe, told the meeting that the infrastructural decay in the manufacturing sector was compounded by the CBN’s directive excluding some essential raw materials from the list of items valid for forex in the country.