Punishing cost of living crisis deepens as Nigeria’s inflation rises again

Nigeria’s annual inflation rate rose to 34.8% in December 2024 from 34.6% in November, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Thursday.

The NBS claimed that the uptick in December was due to increased demand associated with the festive period, with food and non-alcoholic beverages contributing the most to price pressures. But the increase was the fourth consecutive monthly rise.

Nigerians have endured a gripping economic hardship since President Bola Tinubu removed fuel and electricity subsidies and devalued the naira in 2023, driving inflation to its highest levels in nearly three decades.

The pressures eased a bit last July, before another round of petrol price increases again forced it up, exacerbating the worst cost of living crisis in generation in the country.

The government has done barely much to contain the crisis besides the central bank’s routine hiking of interest rates — six times last year — which failed to bring inflation under control.

In his budget plan for 2025, Mr Tinubu says his government expects inflation to fall to 15% this year, helped by lower imports of petroleum products.

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Food inflation was 39.84% year-on-year in December, compared with 39.93% the previous month, due to price rises for items such as yam, sweet potatoes, beer, corn, rice and fish, the NBS said.

The December annual figure represents a year-on-year increase of 5.87 percentage points compared to the 28.92% recorded in December 2023. However, on a month-on-month basis, inflation slowed to 2.44% in December from 2.64% in November, indicating a marginal decline in the rate of price increases for goods and services.

In November, the headline inflation rate stood at 34.6%, up from 33.88% in October. The November inflation rate was 6.4 percentage points higher than the 28.2% recorded a year earlier. Despite the annual increase, the month-on-month rise in November was minimal, with inflation at 2.64% compared to 2.64% in October.

The NBS attributed the slight decline in the month-on-month inflation rate to a reduction in the speed of price increases for some goods, even as year-end demand pressures sustained overall inflationary trends.

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The release of the inflation report comes amid controversy surrounding the NBS website, which has remained inaccessible since mid-December following a high-profile hacking incident.

The agency reported an attack shortly after the agency published a contentious report claiming more than 614,000 Nigerians were killed, and N2.2 trillion paid in ransom to kidnappers between May 2023 and April 2024.

The website remains down, raising questions about the agency’s ability to manage its data infrastructure. NBS spokesperson Sunday Ichedi told Pluboard that efforts to restore the site were ongoing, citing holiday season delays but denying any connection between the website outage and the controversial security report.