Nigerian cenbank stops dollar sales to FX operators, naira sinks

Nigeria's central bank is halting dollar sales to non-bank foreign exchange operators and letting commercial banks accept dollar deposits with immediate effect, its governor said on Monday, in an effort to shore up dwindling foreign reserves.
Africa's biggest economy, an OPEC member state that depends on oil sales for about 95 percent of its foreign reserves, has been hammered by collapsing global oil prices, which has sent its naira currency sharply lower and slowed its economy.
Godwin Emefiele said the sale of foreign exchange to bureaux de change would be discontinued because they were using up the country's foreign reserves for illegal transactions and selling the dollar at 250 naira compared to the official central bank rate of 197 naira.
The currency hit a record low of 282 per dollar on the unofficial market on Monday after the central bank's announcement.
Emefiele said foreign reserves stood at around $28 billion compared with $37 billion in June 2014, and that the bureaux were depleting them at a rate of $28.4 million per week.
"This is a huge haemorrhage on our scarce foreign exchange reserves, and cannot continue," Emefiele told a news conference in the capital Abuja.
Emefiele said monthly foreign earnings had plummeted as low as $1 billion from highs of $3.2 billion while demand for foreign exchange has risen sharply over the last decade.
"The last time we had oil prices at about $50 per barrel for an extended period of time was in 2005. At that time, our average import bill was 148.3 billion naira per month... Our average import bill for the first nine months of 2015 is 917.6 billion," he said.