LAGOS – The Nigerian naira demonstrated strong resilience this week, maintaining a stable trading range despite a marginal late-week depreciation driven by localized foreign exchange demand pressures.
According to data from the Nigerian Foreign Exchange Market (NFEM), the local currency closed the weekly trading session at N1,379.00 per dollar, a light drop from its mid-week peak of N1,367.29.
In the parallel market, the dollar exchanged closely at N1,410.00, keeping the arbitrage spread between the official and black-market rates constrained to a narrow margin of N31.
Market analysts attributed the currency’s overall stability to consistent regulatory oversight and improved corporate inflows, which effectively neutralized aggressive speculative activities that typically drive massive weekend fluctuations.
The underlying stability follows recent institutional structural reforms, most notably the Central Bank of Nigeria’s aggressive regulatory cleanup that led to the direct de-licensing of over 4,100 Bureau De Change operators.
This consolidation continues to bottleneck illicit parallel channels, enforcing tighter compliance and bridging the historical valuation gap between official economic data and informal street-level retail trading.
