Yemisi Izuora
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has said that the Nigerian economy recorded about $5 billion foreign investment inflows following successful general elections in February/March 2019.
The bank’s governor, Mr. Godwin Emefiele, who gave the figure on Friday in Washington DC, USA, assured that the apex bank was committed to ensuring that the Nigerian financial system was not only sound, but able to support the real sector in boosting Nigeria’s growth and development, while continuing to attract foreign investors.
According to him, “Although monumental feats have been achieved by the CBN in various aspects of development finance, foreign exchange management, financial inclusion and payments system in the past five years, challenges remain.”
“Since its establishment, the CBN has recorded about $35 billion in autonomous forex inflows through this Window alone. As a result, exchange rate pressures eased considerably across all markets as the rates converged to about N360/$ and the distortive premium almost eliminated.
“At the Bureau De Change segment, there has been a significant appreciation of the Naira from over N525 per dollar in February 2017 to about N360 per dollar today. Rates at the I & E Window also appreciated from nearly N382 per dollar in May 2017 to just over N360 per dollar”.
Commenting on its Anchor Borrowers Programme (ABP) initiative, he explained: “as at December 2018, a sum of N174.48 billion had been disbursed through 19 participating Financial Institutions (FPIs) to finance 902,518 farmers, working with 194 anchor companies. During the period, 2807,775 and 8,423,325 direct and indirect jobs respectively had been created under ABP.”