The NBS disclosed this in its ‘Consumer Price Index April
2022’ report on Monday.
The report read in part, “In April 2022, the consumer price
index, which measures inflation increased to 16.82 per cent on a year-on-year
basis.”
The International Monetary Fund had recently projected that
Nigeria’s Consumer Price Index would hit 16.1 per cent in 2022.
This projection was presented in a tabular illustration in
the IMF’s ‘Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa’, which was
published on its website.
The latest inflation rate in April is the highest in the
country since August 2021 when it was 17.01 per cent.
The rise in the inflation rate in April shows that Nigeria
is not left out in the global inflation surge.
But it is also an indication that citizens are becoming
poorer, especially given the weakening state of the currency.
In the World Economic Outlook report, the IMF warned about
the effects of inflation.
The report read in part, “In sub-Saharan Africa, food prices
are also the most important channel of transmission, although in slightly
different ways. Wheat is a less important part of the diet, but food, in
general, is a larger share of consumption.
“Higher food prices will hurt consumers’ purchasing power,
particularly among low-income households, and weigh on domestic demand. Social
and political turmoil, most notably in West Africa, also weighs on the
outlook.”
Recently, the World Bank said COVID-19 pandemic-induced
inflation pushed about 23 million Nigerians into a food crisis in 2021,
especially in regions battling conflicts.
It added that the war-driven disruptions in the food trade,
higher food price inflation, and higher costs of administering food assistance
efforts are likely to make more people food insecure.
Aside from the pandemic and the ongoing war in Ukraine, the
World Bank in a different report had said that import restrictions and
non-flexible exchange rate management of the Central Bank of Nigeria were the
major driving forces for food inflation in Nigeria.
The report had read in part, “Rising food prices are the
underlying factor behind the surge of headline inflation in Nigeria. Food
prices have increased due to import restrictions and a nonflexible exchange
rate management.
“The current regime is keeping the official exchange rate of
the naira artificially strong while the naira has weakened significantly on the
parallel market. Additionally, the central bank has restricted importers’
access to foreign currency for 45 products and has reduced the supply to other
importers.”
This, coupled with border closures across Nigeria in recent
times, also worsened inflation, analysts said.