The purpose of this study is to examine the role of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in the foreign currency crisis that occurred in the Nigeria from 2014 to 2017.
The author adopts a qualitative approach using data collected from CBN websites (e.g., official documents, reports and memorandums), newspaper articles and interviews with key market participants.
The paper leverages the concept of the earmarking of money (Zelizer, 1989) to elucidate the idiosyncratic policies of a central bank (i.e. the CBN) facing a foreign currency crisis. It demonstrates how CBN policies led to earmarking foreign currencies, which disrupted local currency as unit of account in foreign currency markets. The paper not only examines the nexus of the social relations of money and money as a unit of account within unique contexts but also how local institutions and foreign currency earmarking became mutually reconstitutive.
This study illustrates the dilemma many emerging countries face in managing different types of foreign currency inflows.
With increasing transnational flows of foreign currencies, understanding how recipient nations states manage currency flows beyond their control becomes a salient issue.
While other studies have demonstrated earmarking at the individual level, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first to demonstrate earmarking of money at the macroeconomic level.
