CENTRAL Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Godwin Emefiele, was at the Presidential Villa, Abuja on Thursday for a meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari.
The apex bank chief who was led to press briefing room by a senior aide to the president, told State House correspondents, that he came to give the president routine briefing on the activities of the bank.
The president was thought to be resting on the orders of his doctors going by the statement of Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, in Abuja of Wednesday.
However, after the meeting with the president, Emefiele said: “Basically, as it’s expected, what we normally do is from time to time is to brief the President about our activities, about the Central Bank of Nigeria, particularly at this time as it relates to the efforts that the Central Bank is doing to stabilize the forex market.
“And we briefed him regarding the activities so far and he was very delighted to hear that the market is stabilising at the level that it is right now, and I am saying the parallel market which currently stabilizes at between 380 and 385 (naira to dollar).
Expatiating on the briefing, he said crude oil production has increased and the price has reached up to $56 per barrel.
He stated: “There is no secret its about the fact that at this time we have seen production of crude and increasing export of crude also. The fact that we have seen also crude prices oxilating to between 50 to 55 to 56 it has helped our revenue position and had also provided some ammunition for the Central Bank to defend the currency.
“Given what we have right now the fact that the revenues are looking good, the state of the economy is good and I believe that we are going to pull out of the problem in due course.”
On the injection of more funds into the forex market, Emefiele explained that the bank was only carrying out its responsibility.
According to him, “Our responsibility as Central Bank of Nigeria is to do what we are doing at this time. Nigerians or importers people who need foreign exchange to do businesses need these foreign exchanges to conduct businesses and given the fact that we are able to increase our EFEX revenues, the natural thing to do is to make the foreign exchange available to those who need them to import or to carry out eligible transactions.”