BoSS vows to continue auctioning US$5m every week

The Governor of Central Bank Dier Tong Ngor has said the process to inject more US dollars into the market will continue to match the demand and continue providing a facelift to the South Sudanese Pounds.

“One of the challenges that we had in the past is that we needed to build our foreign exchange reserves so that we can have enough dollars that can satisfy the market,” he lamented while addressing the media in Juba at the bank’s premises.

He emphasised that the market still had loopholes to be sealed and persistence in circulation of the foreign currency would do the trick in upstaging the problems.

“We will continue to monitor the market if there is need for us to increase the US$5 million [then] we will do that. But we are more combatable with using the price to correct this rather than using the amount of dollars put in the market.”

No results

On Wednesday last week, traders in Juba—both nationals and foreigners—held a meeting with the Central Equatoria State minister for trade and industry, where they raised a concern about the dollars being auctioned with no results in the market.  

This comes along with complaints from the consumers that prices of commodities have remained higher despite the SSP strengthening. Hence, the end result has not benefitted the common man.

But Ngor explained that the supply of the dollars is still necessary and that there is no wastage.

“…the exchange has played a major role to correct the supply and demand imbalance because since we started the auction, we have been nearly mopping up something like 2.5 or 3billion South Sudanese Pounds every week,” he said assuredly.

“This means that when the amount of pounds is reduced in the hands of the public, the capacity for paying dollars will also be reduced even if you don’t increase the amount of dollars’ possibility of supply and demand,” he explained.

He revealed that money supply growth was too fast to the margin of 300 per cent last year. This meant that the bank had to pump a lot of pounds into the economy and that amount was ‘chasing the limited amount of dollars that was already in the market.’

The bank decided to accept the contrition policy to drain part of the cash that was chasing dollars that would have an impact on the exchange rate.

He explained that when they carryout mopping, they are targeting those who keep their pounds and wait to hear that dollars are out [so that] they can go and change the money.

He added that they had put up a ‘liquidity management’ to help in decision making.