Fakoyejo Olalekan
August 24, 2022 Dollar Rates Update: Bureau De Change (BDC) operators increased Dollar rates on Tuesday, as demand for the United States currency outweighs supply in the black market and official forex market in Nigeria.
The operators in the parallel market sold $1 at a price of N692, raising the value of dollar by 1.3%, having sold the American currency to buyers at N685 during business hour on Monday.
Intense demand for dollar had led to reports of foreign airlines such as British Airways and Turkish Airways requesting their customers in Nigeria to buy tickets in foreign currency, while Emirates Airlines has threatened to discontinue flights into and from Nigeria.
Emirates Airlines said over $80 million of its funds is trapped in Nigeria, with no foreign exchange available to enable the company repatriate the money to its parent country in Dubai.
Meanwhile, in the official foreign exchange market, traders’ Dollar rates for naira was N430.67 by the end of trading on Tuesday. This is higher than the N429.07 that the US greenback was sold the previous day.
The correlation of the black market and the investors & exporters window in terms of the depreciation of naira has grown recently, with scarcity of dollar in both markets integrating the two forex channels.
This is despite the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) reportedly flooding the official foreign exchange market with forex, as Nigeria’s international reserves dropped to $38.882 billion as of August 11, from $39.219 billion at the end of July.
Part of the $337 million taken out of the foreign reserves was used to fund the forex market, but the dollar rates at the black market was high because the black market was left out of the central bank supply.
