By Kolawole Ojebisi
The National Bureau of Statistics has announced a drastic fall in Nigeria’s inflation rate from 34.8 percent in December 2024 to 24.48 percent in January.
NBS attributed this positive development to the rebasing of Consumer Price Index (CPI)
In a statement addressing the CPI report for January on Tuesday, NBS said the rate represents an increase of 18.12 percent compared to the 29.9 percent recorded in January 2024.
Recall that in October 2024, Adeyemi Adeniran, statistician-general of the federation and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of NBS, announced plans to rebase the GDP and CPI to reflect current realities and account for structural changes in the economy.
On January 9, the NBS said 2019 was picked as the rebase year because “other sector-specific administrative data for this period were collected”.
In the statement, Adeniran said the “all-items index which is used to measure headline inflation for January 2025 was 110.7, resulting in a headline inflation rate of 24.48% on a year-on-year basis”.
“This increase was mainly driven by Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverages, Restaurants and Accommodation Services and Transport,” Adeniran said.
“The Food Index for January 2025 was 110.03, resulting in a Food Inflation rate of 26.08% year-on-year.
“The Core Index which is All-Items less farm produce and energy for January 2025 was 110.7, which gave rise to a Core Inflation rate of 22.59% year-on-year.
“Disaggregating by sector, the Urban inflation rate was 26.09%, while the Rural Inflation rate was 22.15%.
“In line with improvements made to the reporting of the CPI, going forward, NBS will be publishing some new special indices to inform policymakers.
“These special indices include the Farm Produce Index, Energy Index, Services Index, Goods Index, and Imported Food Index.
“For January 2025, these new special indices produced the following inflation rate (please note that these rates are not year-on-year rates as the headline rates mentioned above) as these indices are new, the year-on-year rates will commence from January 2026, while the month-on-month rates will commence in February 2025.”
NBS said the food inflation rate stood at 26.08 percent, down from 39.84 percent, and the core inflation rate dropped from 29.28 percent to 22.59 percent,
Also, the urban inflation rate declined to 26.09 percent, from 37.29 percent, and the rural inflation rate stood at 22.15 percent, down from 32.47 percent.
