BY: EMMANUEL ABARA BENSON
Nigeria’s headline inflation soars to 19.64% in July 2022
Nigeria’s inflation rate has soared to its highest level since 2005.
The uptick was driven by food inflation as well as the continuous depreciation of the naira which has increased the cost of imports.
Nigeria’s inflation is one of the highest in Africa.
Nigeria’s inflation rate blasted to a 17-year high in July at 19.64%, up from 18.60% in June, according to the latest Consumer Price Index report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
The report, seen by Business Insider Africa, showed that the inflation rate increased by 1.82% on a month-on-month.
This is the highest level Nigeria’s inflation has accelerated to since September 2005. And it was driven by food inflation which rose to 22% during the month under review, up from 20.6% in June 2022.
The jump in food inflation was due mainly to increases in the prices of different staples like bread and cereals, potatoes, yam, meat, fish, oil, etc.
“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 report explained.
The depreciation of the naira against the dollar also pressured the cost of imports, thus contributing to the increase in inflation.
Urban inflation rose to 20.09% in July, up from 19.09% in June. Similarly, rural inflation rose to 19.22 in July, up from 18.13% in June.
Like most African countries, Nigeria has been grappling with an inflation problem that keeps getting worse, exacerbated by many unfavourable internal and external factors. Some of these factors include the ongoing war in Ukraine and the forex crisis. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently warned that these factors are pushing many African countries to the brink of economic collapse.
