Source: Bloomberg

Nigeria's foreign currency reserves rose 3 percent in the month through Dec. 3 as oil prices and production improved.

Reserves climbed to $44.04 billion from $42.7 billion the month before, the Central Bank of Nigeria, based in the capital, Abuja, said on its Web site today.

Nigeria's currency reserves have fallen from about $62 billion at the end of 2007 after attacks by armed groups campaigning for a bigger slice of the oil wealth in the Delta area, home to the country's oil industry, halted more than 25 percent of production in the past three years.

Nigeria, Africa's most populous country which vies with Angola to be the continent's top oil producer, boosted oil output to 2.6 million barrels a day last week from 2.4 million the week earlier, Emmanuel Egbogah, President Umaru Yar'Adua?s adviser on petroleum, told state-owned television on Dec. 4.

Production rose after many fighters in the region accepted the offer of a government amnesty and The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, the biggest armed group, declared an "indefinite cease-fire" on Oct. 25.

The reserves will rise further as the central bank's twice- weekly foreign exchange auction will be closed in the last two weeks of the year, said Bismarck Rewane, Chief Executive Officer of Financial Derivatives Co. Ltd., a fund manager in the commercial hub of Lagos.

Crude oil for January was trading at $74.56 a barrel in electronic trading today on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Oil, which accounts for more than 90 percent of Nigerian exports, has risen from a low of $34 a barrel a year ago.