The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has raised the Monetary Policy Rate (MPR) by 100 basis points to 17.5 percent from 16.5 percent in its efforts to contain inflation through monetary tightening.
Speaking at the conclusion of this year’s first meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee, MPC, held in Abuja yesterday, Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Mr. Godwin Emefiele, explained that while previous rate hikes had begun to moderate inflationary pressures, the outcome was not yet good enough to hold or reduce the MPR.
“We are happy that some of the policies 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 also in beginning to drop,” he said.
“However, MPC members believe that the 10 basis point drops from 21. 47% to 21.34% is insufficient to warrant celebration.
“We concluded that, while the year-on-year inflation rate was decreasing, the other underlying figures did not give us reason to celebrate, so we decided to be aggressive in our tightening.”
Only N370b in Stamp Duty was collected.
Emefiele denied that the CBN had an N89 trillion Stamp Duty fund.
“It defies our imagination that those arguments can arise,” he said. N89 trillion is a huge amount of money. The banking industry’s total assets are currently around N71 or N71.5 trillion. The total amount of bank deposits is N44. 498 trillion.
“How then is it possible that Stamp duty of N89 trillion, that is twice the value of the deposit of banks? Is that even possible? The total amount of stamp duty collected since 2016 is N370.686 billion. The Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) paid N226.462 billion to the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee (FAAC), leaving a balance of 144.234 billion in the CBN account”.
