Inflation hits 16.82%, exceeds IMF’s 2022 projection

The Consumer Price Index rose to 16.82 per cent in April from 15.92 per cent in March, latest figures from the National Bureau of Statistics have revealed.

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.