The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on Thursday released a total of N3.5 billion non-oil exports rebate to exporters through the banks, which are supporting the RT200 initiative.
The move is in fulfillment of the apex Bank promise on the policy of the race to $200 billion from non-oil exports to boost the foreign exchange inflows into the country.
This was disclosed by Nneka Onyeali-Ikpe, managing director/CEO of Fidelity Bank Plc during the press briefing after the bankers committee meeting on Thursday.
Godwin Emefiele, governor of the CBN had last week hinted of commencement of the payment of rebate for foreign exchange export proceeds or earnings to exporters.
The banking and finance regulator had promised to pay N65 bonus for every $1 of repatriated non-oil export proceeds sold at the Investors and Exporters (I&E) window, the official FX rate.
Onyeali-Ikpe said the payment is going to be quarterly and that 150 customers of various levels both under finished and semi-finished goods exports are going to benefit.
On the RT 200, she said the amount of FX that has come into the country since the new policy is $60 million, and the figure is coming out of the Central Bank.
According to her, while the proceeds utilized by the exporter will attract a rebate of N35 per dollar, the proceeds from export sold to other end users will attract a rebate of N65 per dollar.
The policy implementation announced by the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele also pronounced a single digit interest rate for the state government to set up export processing zones, she said.
She believes that the initiative will promote long-term financing that would boost forex inflows to the country and ramp up exports.
Others who addressed the journalists included Haruna Mustafa, director banking supervision, CBN, Miriam Olusanya, managing director of GTBank, Ademola Adebise, managing director/CEO, Wema Bank, Abubakar Suleiman, managing director/CEO, Sterling Bank and Osita Nwanisobi, director, corporate communications, CBN.
In the E-Naira, Olusanya said, “we pioneered this in October last year. Since it was launched, we have seen 756,000 downloads of the App.
In terms of the consumer wallet, we have seen 165,000 consumer wallets and 2,800 merchant wallets”.
Read also: CBN to begin payment of FX rebate to exporters
She said the advantage of the eNaira is that it is at no cost and that one of the things the CBN wants to achieve is that it will remain cheaper even if there is a cost to it, subsequently. It will still remain cheaper than other transactional channels.
“Currently, it is an App. We are moving to the second phase. The plan is to be able to onboard the unbanned using the USSD platform. This will be able to aid financial inclusion. This channel is cheaper, reliable and always available. It supports the digital economy, improve economic activities,” she said.
Adebise explained that Merchants can also get immediate value for their sales that they make on a daily basis rather than the next day value existing on some other platforms.
“As I said, this is complementary and basically geared towards improving the efficiency of our payment platform systems.
“And very shortly, the NQR code will be acceptable in well over 176 countries . So, the Committee decided that after appraising the progress made on the adoption to increase the level of the payment platform considering the huge benefit it brings to the economy,” he said.
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