Retail SMIS Gets $335.43m CBN Lift

The Retail Secondary Market Intervention Sales (SMIS) of the foreign exchange market has received a boost of 335.43 million from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

This was according to CBN’s Acting Director, Corporate Communications, Mr. Isaac Okorafor, who made the disclosure in a statement on Friday.

Okarafor revealed that the latest figures released by the apex bank was to cater to Forex requests in the agricultural, airlines, petroleum products and raw materials and machinery sectors.

The CBN Director said the continued intervention were in line with the assurances made by the Governor, Godwin Emefiele, to sustain market liquidity in order to boost production and trade and maintain stability in the forex market.

Okorafor explained that, with increasing accretion to the country’s reserve, the Bank is in a much better position to ensure liquidity in the inter-bank sector of the market and as such would continue to intervene in order to drive growth in the economy and guarantee stability in the market, “particularly now that the economy had gained steam due to an upsurge in the non-oil sector”.

He said the CBN will continue to ensure the availability of Forex as part of its determination to maintain the country’s external reserves in order to safeguard the international value of the Naira, noting that naira as of Friday, March 9, 2018, exchanged against the dollar at N360/$1.

It will be recalled that the CBN, in its last SMIS in February 2018, injected the sum of $321.4 million in the interbank market, while also intervening in the inter-bank Foreign Exchange Market to the tune of $210,000,000, comprising of $100million for the wholesale segment and $55 million for both the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and invisibles segment.