Nigeria’s Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures the percentage change in the price of a basket of goods and services consumed by householdssustained its upward movement in July 2022 as it rose to 19.64percent, compared with 18.6percent recorded in the previous month.
This is the highest inflation figure since October 2005 when inflation was 24.3 percent.
Latest release by Nigeria’s data agency, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) food inflation accelerated to 22.02% from 20.6% recorded in June 2022.
The rise in food inflation, according to the NBS, was caused by increases in prices of Bread and cereals, Food products, Potatoes, yam and other tubers, meat, fish, oil, and fat.
Similarly, the core inflation, which excludes the prices of volatile agricultural produce rose to 16.26% in the month of July 2022, from 15.75% recorded in July.
The highest increases were recorded in prices of gas, liquid fuel, solid fuel, passenger transport by road, passenger transport by air, garments, cleaning, repair and hire of clothing.
“The percentage change in the average CPI for the twelve months period ending July 2022 over the average of the CPI for the previous twelve months period was 16.75%, showing a 0.46% increase compared to 16.30% recorded in July 2021, the report showed.
According to the NBS report, the urban inflation increased by 2.08% to 20.09% in July 2022 from 18.01% in July 2021. On the other hand, the rural inflation rate reached 19.22% from 16.75% in the corresponding period of 2021.
“On a month-on-month basis, the food inflation rate in July was 2.04%, this was a 0.01% insignificant decline compared to the rate recorded in June 2022 (2.05%),” the agency equally noted in its latest report.
“This decline is attributed to a reduction in the prices of some food items like Tubers, Maize, Garri, and Vegetables.
“The average annual rate of food inflation for the twelve-month period ending July 2022 over the previous twelve-month average was 18.75%, which was a 1.42% points decline from the average annual rate of change recorded in July 2021 (20.16%), the release added.
Inflation rates across the states, the report added: “In July 2022, all items’ inflation rate on a year-on-year basis was highest in Akwa Ibom (22.88%), Ebonyi (22.51%), Kogi (22.08%), while Jigawa (16.62%), Kaduna (17.04%) and Borno (18.04%) recorded the slowest rise in headline Year-on-Year inflation.
“However, on a month-on-month basis, July 2022 recorded the highest increases in Adamawa (2.87%), Abuja (2.84%), Oyo (2.77%), while Bauchi (0.82%), Kano (0.83%) and Niger (1.03%) recorded the slowest rise on month-on-month inflation.”