Market News

Over the past year as a result of the CBN’s decision to float the Naira, our local currency has been on a roller coaster ride with the Naira losing significant value in the process along with its consequent negative effect on the economy. Even though the value of the Naira was expected to fall as a result of the floating, not even our most pessimistic analysts expected it to fall as low as it did before the CBN intervened to defend the Naira.

Even though the floating of the Naira was a step in the right direction, the implementation was abysmal as the CBN failed to put policies in place to stimulate increased foreign exchange inflows while nothing was done to curb the high and unnecessary demand for foreign exchange in the country. Also in a move that left all observers dumbfounded, they lifted the ban placed on accessing forex from the CBN for 40 items that had been previously banned by the CBN and thus increased the demand for foreign exchange when they should have been working to reduce it.

Due to their poor planning and execution, the CBN had bungled the floating of the Naira policy and instead of addressing the root causes of the high devaluation of the Naira, they decided to look for a scapegoat to blame the same way they did under the leadership of Emefiele and blamed Aboki Fx for the fall of the Naira when our local currency was losing value during the Buhari administration.

This time around they decided to make a popular cryptocurrency trading platform, Binance their scapegoat and even went ahead to arrest two of their executives who came to the country to honor the EFCC’s invitation to their organization and shed more light on Binance’s operations in Nigeria.