Tunde was ready pay N460 per dollar on Friday as he has been doing for the last few weeks but on this day, no one was willing to sell to him.
“Oga, I cannot sell any longer, not after the DSS raided my office yesterday and picked my boys for selling dollars above N400/$,” Tunde, 41, recalls the response his dealer gave him after he called to buy dollars.
Tunde who was getting used to paying premium for the dollars now has to contend with not getting it to buy at all.
“I cannot buy at all. I tried to source dollars elsewhere and to my surprise, everywhere I tried to buy dollars, my usual sources declined to sell” he said in an interview with BusinessDay.
Nigerian manufacturers are starved for dollars, and the effect is so bad that it plunged the manufacturing sector into recession but Tunde’s case suggests that the tide may worsen.
Nigeria’s new policy of forcefully pegging the rate at which dollars are sold in the parallel market is backfiring as dealers in the black market have decided to hoard the currency.
BusinessDay investigations show that traders are beginning to hoard their dollars in clear resistance to the attempt to peg the rates at which they sell.
A visit to some parts of Lagos, which usually saw high numbers of black market dealers, had low activity as the dealers claimed they had no dollars to sell.
“The dollars we have are the ones we bought at high rate. If we sell at N400 to the US$, we will lose our money that is why people are not selling dollars,” one trader who gave his name as Mohammed said.
Travellers at the international airport, Lagos also faced difficulties buying dollars as most of the Bureau De Change (BDC) operators declined to sell when BusinessDay visited the airport.
A traveller (name withheld) told BusinessDay that some of the black market dealers had sold dollars earlier at the rate of N460 to a dollar.
BusinessDay’s checks on Friday evening showed that the only Bureau De Change selling dollars was IBRO Resources Bureau De Change, which sold at the sum of N400 and Travelex, which sold at the sun of N385.
However, just like Travelex, IBRO resources Bureau De Change requested from buyers that they present their travel documents before they could buy the dollar.
There was a long queue at the Travelex desk but there was almost no queue at the IBRO desk at the airport.
“I have a flight to catch in the next one hour and I have been on this queue since mid-day. The time is 6pm now and if I am not able to buy dollars at Travelex to do my business, I may have to cancel my flight and that is extra cost for me,” Chibuzor Mbakwe, told BuinessDay.
Mbakwe said that when he saw that the Travelex queue would slow him down, he decided to buy from IBRO resources and he was told they had also run out of dollars and would only be able to sell dollars worth N5, 000 to him.
He explained that he was confused as to what to do, especially as no other BDC operator was selling at the airport.
BusinessDay checks also show that while BDC operators declined to sell the dollar, they were offering to sell British pounds (GBP) at the rate of N550.
CSL stockbrokers also noted that black market operators are ignoring the CBN order to sell the naira at N400 and were sell selling at N450 to the US$.
The attempt by the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Department of State Security (DSS) to force street dealers to sell the dollar at a particular price has come under heavy criticism from different quarters.
Ben Murray Bruce, a senator from Bayelsa State took to his twitter account on Friday, saying, “Money is a coward. The more we frighten money the more it will run away from Nigeria. Raiding financial institutions is not a good sign,”
Dolapo Oni, Head of Energy Research, at Ecobank, also posted on his twitter handle “great, so we have a parallel market for our parallel market. I think the aim is to see how many rates we can create in this market”.
