Unifying Nigeria's exchange-rate windows

Years after the 2016 float, Nigeria's foreign-exchange market remained fragmented into several official windows, including the Investors' and Exporters' window, bureaux de change allocations, and a persistently wide parallel-market rate, a structure the CBN itself documents as having evolved through successive adjustments from the mid-1990s onward. The naira depreciated a further 66.45% across the official windows between 2021 and 2023 alone, moving on average from about 381 to 454 to 634 naira per dollar in those three years as oil receipts weakened and external reserves came under renewed strain. On 14 June 2023, under new CBN leadership, the bank introduced a willing-buyer, willing-seller model for the interbank market, collapsing the multiple segments into a single Nigerian Foreign Exchange Market, and followed in October 2023 with further steps to unify rates and eliminate the official-parallel gap. The CBN framed the overhaul as necessary to restore confidence after years in which the multiple-rate system had been criticized by the IMF and World Bank and had encouraged arbitrage rather than the investment the exchange-rate policy was meant to attract.