Data from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) show that gross official reserves declined by $20 million in June on a 30-day moving average basis to $26.4billion. The monthly average has been an outflow of US$430m since the one-off bonus of July 2015, when the CBN acquired the $2.5bn foreign exchange (fx) deposits of government departments and agencies.
Given that oil revenues were at best flat, the CBN launched its new exchange-rate regime on 20 June, 2016 to ease off the pressure of the dollar on the naira.
Another measure would be net of the CBN’s forward obligations. These include the CBN’s forward sales totaling $3.49bn on 20 June (including $700m on a one-month basis) in what cleared, it said, the fx backlog.
It is understood that the CBN’s fx spot sales over a week are now comparable to the figure of about $200million when it operated the previous managed rate of N197 per US dollar.
Without an unlikely recovery in the oil price, the driver of fx availability (and indirectly, reserves) will be the extent to which CBN sales are supplemented by inflows from autonomous sources such as offshore portfolio monies.