What Is the Dollar to Naira Rate Today?

Why Nigeria has two dollar rates

Nigeria quotes the dollar twice, and the two numbers mean different things.

The first is the official rate. The Central Bank of Nigeria publishes it daily as a buying, central and selling price, derived from what banks and authorised dealers actually traded in the Nigerian Foreign Exchange Market the previous session. It is the rate that governs bank transfers, letters of credit, customs valuations, and anything that passes through a regulated channel. It is the rate of record, and it is the rate this page treats as the source of truth.

The second is the parallel rate — the street rate, the aboki rate, the black market rate, depending on who is speaking. It is what bureau de change operators and independent dealers quote for cash dollars outside those channels. Nobody publishes it centrally. Trackers collect quotes and post them, and different trackers post different numbers on the same afternoon.

Both are real. Neither is a substitute for the other. If your money moves through a bank, the official rate is the one that applies to you; if you are buying cash notes on Awolowo Road or sending someone to a dealer in Wuse, the parallel rate is. The gap between them is the interesting part, and it is the thing this page measures rather than either number alone.

— abuja.cool desk

The naira is the price of everything

Nigeria imports the dollar into almost every price a household pays, and the route it takes is short enough to trace.

Start with fuel. Crude is priced in dollars worldwide, and so is refined petrol — including the petrol produced at Lekki, because a refinery that can export at the world price has no reason to sell below it at home. When the naira weakens, the naira cost of a litre rises even if the dollar price of the barrel has not moved at all. That is not a policy failure; it is arithmetic. It is also why, in July, Dangote briefly quoted its gantry price in dollars outright — 0.779 dollars a litre — and the naira price followed the exchange rate rather than the other way round.

Fuel then becomes transport. Nigeria moves nearly everything it eats by road, most of it in diesel trucks, and the FCT sits some 700 kilometres from the ports. A change at the gantry reaches an Abuja market as a change in the haulage bill within a week or two, and haulage is a larger share of the price of a tuber of yam in Wuse than of the same yam in Benue.

Transport then becomes food, which is where households actually feel it. Food is roughly 72 per cent of what a Nigerian household spends on groceries — the single largest line in the budget — and food inflation was running at 17.52 per cent year on year in June, above the 15.91 per cent headline rate. So the chain is: dollar to naira, naira to fuel, fuel to transport, transport to food, food to almost everything a family notices.

Which is why the exchange rate is worth watching even if you never touch a dollar. It is not a number for importers and travellers. It is the upstream price of the market run.

One honest caveat, visible in this year's data: the chain has lags, and it is not symmetric. The official naira is meaningfully stronger against the dollar than it was twelve months ago, and food inflation has not fallen by anything like the same proportion. Prices climb faster than they fall — traders pass on costs quickly and margins back slowly — and the naira is one input among several, alongside the harvest, insecurity in the producing states, and the cost of diesel for the trucks. Expect the direction to transmit. Do not expect the magnitude to.

— abuja.cool desk