Nov 7, 2014/Bloomberg

Nigeria’s central bank intervened in the market to defend the naira after it plunged to an all-time low amid a drop in oil prices, Deputy Governor Sarah Alade said.

“We are in the market now,” Alade said by phone from the capital, Abuja. “We haven’t abandoned the market. We will continue to defend the currency.”

The naira pared its drop and was unchanged at 170 a dollar as of 11:50 a.m. in the commercial capital, Lagos, after falling as much 1.6 percent. The currency has declined 3.6 percent this quarter.

Efforts by Africa’s biggest oil producer to stem the rout with dollar sales and a ban on import payments have been overwhelmed by crude’s tumble to a four-year low. The central bank will probably raise its benchmark rate, already at a record high of 12 percent, to avoid burning through the nation’s reserves after they fell to a three-month low of $38 billion, according to Capital Economics Ltd. in London.

“The bank is making efforts to defend the currency,” Ibrahim Mu’azu, a spokesman for the Central Bank of Nigeria, said earlier by phone from the capital, Abuja. “We don’t want any crash. There is no decision to devalue the currency.”

Africa’s largest economy banned paying for imported goods such as electronics, generators and telecommunications equipment, using foreign-exchange bought at bi-weekly auctions, according to a circular posted on the Abuja-based regulator’s website yesterday.

“We believe that the events over the past few days have raised the likelihood of the policy rate being hiked,” Ridle Markus and Dumisani Ngwenya, Johannesburg-based strategists at Barclays Africa Group Ltd., said in an e-mailed note today. “The likelihood of an emergency meeting next week, two weeks ahead of the scheduled meeting, cannot be excluded.”

(An earlier version of this story corrected the extent of the naira’s drop in the third paragraph.)