By Munachimso Obienyi
With the scarcity of FX in the economy, the cost of commodities in the coming weeks is expected to increase, thus fueling inflation for goods that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is not providing foreign currencies for.
This is coming after the Naira recovered some of its losses as it strengthened against the United States greenback, trading at N800 per dollar on Tuesday afternoon.
NwafoLive gathered that although some Bureau De Change (BDCs) operators were still selling the United States currency between N870/$1 in V.I and N880/$1 in Jakande areas of Lagos State, a look at black market platform, ngrates.com indicated the Naira, which last weekend plunged to as low as N890 per dollar at the parallel market, gained against the dollar to recover from the downward spiral recorded last week.
As of Monday, the exchange rate between the USD and naira was between N865 to N870 across various areas in Lagos.
With the black market exchange rate high at about N870, the importers of the 41 items on the forex banned list of the Central Bank of Nigeria, which includes rice, private airplanes/jets, Indian incense, tinned fish in sauce (sardines), amongst others will have to increase the price of their products for depending on the parallel market.
Also, considering the scarcity of dollars in the official market, which has pushed traders to the parallel market to quickly obtain forex, importers of products like television brands, cars and more items not produced in Nigeria will also raise the price of their goods, in a bid to recover the cost of obtaining the dollars in the parallel market.
As a result, the cost of living in Nigeria will continue to rise, and reduce consumer spendings, which in turn, will negatively affect the revenue of the traders and other companies involved in importation especially with the Christmas season in December.
