By Dipo Olowookere
The weekly sale of treasury bills via the Open Market Operations (OMO) by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) suffered a huge setback on Thursday as most investors stayed back from the exercise.
Of the N300 billion worth of the OMO bills offered for sale by the apex bank yesterday, only a paltry of N41 billion was eventually sold.
Business Post gathered that this was mainly due to liquidity strain in the system.
Out of the N50 billion offered for the 112-day bill, the CBN could only manage to rake 60 million at 11.05 percent, while it sold N40.89 billion from the N250 billion worth of the 182-day instrument at 12.15 percent.
At the close of transactions yesterday, the T-bills market traded with mixed sentiments with yields closing lower.
Meanwhile, the money market rates declined on Thursday with the overnight rate closing at 13.71 percent from 24.67 percent in the previous session.
Also, the Open Buy Back (OBB) rate went down to 13.33 percent yesterday from 23.33 percent in the last session.
According to analysts at Zedcrest Research, this came on the back of inflows from OMO T-bills and Net PMA repayments of about N296 billion, which helped bolster system liquidity to a net positive position of about N180 billion positive.
“We expect rates to maintain a downtrend tomorrow, as there are no significant outflows expected,” the investment research outfit stated.
Adedapo Adesanya 
Modupe Gbadeyanka