Finance minister, Kemi Adeosun has said on Tuesday that the central bank would eliminate the hard currency black market where the naira trades about 40 percent weaker against the dollar than the official rate reports Reuters.
The central bank (CBN) “has been directed to do this and CBN has promised to do something by putting a system in place to eliminate the black market because it’s damaging the economy,” Kemi Adeosun told a conference.
“The CBN is working on the elimination of arbitrage,” she told Reuters by text message, without saying how this would be done.
Adeosun said this had been in response to a question about manufacturers not getting incentives to produce given an arbitrage opportunity.
The central bank (CBN) scrapped a 16-month-old peg of N197/dollar in June, but it continues to trade in the official market, so that the naira remains far stronger against the dollar there than on the parallel market.
A CBN spokesman, Isaac Okorafor, said the central bank was working towards “ensuring that the forex market operates as effectively as we would envisage”.
He said the aim was to “ensure there is no black market” but did not give details of how this would be achieved.
The dollar currently sells at N305/dollar at the interbank rates as against N487/dollar in the black market.
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