In its efforts to restrain inflation through monetary tightening, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), has further raised the Monetary Policy Rate (MPR) by 100 basis points to 17.5 percent from 16.5 percent.
Speaking at the end of this year’s first meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee, MPC, held in Abuja yesterday, Governor of CBN, Mr. Godwin Emefiele, explained that although the previous rate hikes have already started to moderate inflationary pressures, the result was not yet good enough to hold or reduce the MPR.
His words, “We are happy that some of these policies that we introduced in the last couple of months in our attempt to rein in inflation are beginning to yield results, not just in plateauing but are beginning to drop.
But MPC members feel that the 10 basis points drop from 21. 47% to 21.34% is just not good enough as a reason to begin to celebrate.
“We concluded that yes inflation rate was reducing, Year-on-Year, but the other underlining figures have not given us reasons to celebrate, as such we decided to be aggressive in our tightening.”
