Kenya's central bank is committed to maintaining a freely-traded exchange rate and sees current intervention efforts as a temporary measure to fight market panic, the country's central bank governor said.

"When everybody panics, you have to come up with measures to try and intervene, not to control the direction of the market, but to stem panic. That is not moving away from a floating exchange rate per se," Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) Governor Njuguna Ndung'u told Reuters on Tuesday in a telephone interview from Cancun.

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