Forex is the latest challenge

Nigeria has been neck deep in a debilitating Forex issue for a while now due to our constantly depleting foreign reserves. Making any sort of international payment from the country is quite tedious and there are no signs of alleviation in sight.

This Forex problem has led to a wide disparity between the official market rate gotten from the Central Bank and the easily accessible black market rate. At the time of writing, the official dollar exchange rate is somewhere around 430 Naira while the black market rate for a dollar is around 730 Naira

Due to this unwanted Forex situation, the Central bank has taken drastic measures to mitigate the average Nigerian's access to the dollar, Euro, and almost every other foreign currency.

In fact, according to a text I received from my bank, customers can no longer make any international payment with our debit cards, thus adding an extra layer of difficulty in performing any sort of international transaction in Nigeria.

Let's face it, the dollar is still the World's currency and with pretty much every institution in the world accepting it, there's an underlying siege mentality about not being able to access it with your Nigerian debit card.

The only way

So, right now, there's only one way to officially access Forex in Nigeria but it often takes a while to get through. To access foreign exchange from Nigeria, you have to fill out an online form and then hope your payment goes through.

After filling out the form with all the necessary information about what you intend to do with the foreign currency, you wait in a queue to get processed. The time for the completion of a transaction varies between each bank and that's also based on the fact that each bank is given a certain quota of foreign currency for their customers.

There are conversations about ways to speed up these transactions but most of them usually require either bribe or some concessions to make things proceed faster. This is something that I intend to explore as time goes on.

The alternative to this approach is to buy the foreign currency at the ridiculously high exchange rate and then make the trade. This approach is a lot more expensive but on the bright side, it is instant.

Right now, we have a small window for the transaction to get through and I'll be hoping things work out. My bank said the transaction could take anywhere between 2-4 weeks, so I hope things work out for us.

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