The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mr Godwin Emefiele has stepped in to douse fears over to the inability of the Bank to hold the January 2018 Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting due to lack of statutory quorum as specified in the CBN Act 2007.

This development has arisen from non-confirmation of the nominees by the Senate.

In a statement released on Monday morning, Emefiele expressed confidence that, in spite of the failure to hold the meeting, “key economy indicators continue to move in the right direction with modest recovery in oil prices and boost in the domestic production.”

Other positive indicators which the Governor identified in the statement included continued decline in inflation to 15.37 percent, accretion foreign exchange reserves from about US$23 billion in October 2016 to US$40.78 billion as at January 18, this year.

While reflecting on investors’ confidence, the Governor further revealed that the recently-introduced Investors’ and Exporters’ window has raked-in over US$13 billion within the space of nine months.

The positive economic outlook and the foreign exchange inflows have also impacted positively on the capital market, which boosted the market capitalisation by 22.3 percent from N13.21 trillion on November 30, 2017 to N16.15 trillion as at January 19, 2018.

Meanwhile, the CBN has indicated that in the absence of the meeting of the MPC decisions, the Bank would maintain “key monetary variables as decided by the last MPC meeting of November 2017 as follows: MPR 14.0 percent, CRR 22.5 percent, Liquidity Ratio 30.0 percent and asymmetric corridor between +200 and -500 basis points around the MPR."

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