What a country: “Nigeria’s inflation rate has dropped to 24.48% in January 2025 from 34.80% in December 2024, following the rebasing of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). This rebasing involved updating the methodologies and changing the base year to 2024”.
Smart playbook because when you are on the floor, the variance is muted. Yes, by changing the base year to 2024, you can make inflation appear low since 2024 was already inflated. But if you had used say 2022 when it was largely marginal, inflation would have remained high when compared with Jan 2025 data.
Good People, no one eats statistics but statistics does influence monetary policies as promulgated by the Central Bank of Nigeria. Provided the apex bank does not become complacent that it has solved inflation, the new number may not be a big deal, but if we see it the way we are seeing the unemployment rate in Nigeria where the employment rate is so good that it embarrasses you for quoting it!
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In other words, people have jobs in Nigeria that the governments at all levels do not need to worry about job creation or invest in innovation to boost employment. As of October 2024, the unemployment rate in Nasarawa State, Nigeria was 0.5%, the lowest in the country. At the national level unemployment rate data, the World Bank recorded 35% for Nigeria, but Nigeria recorded 3.07% for itself. That number was better than unemployment rates in Canada, UK, USA and many other economies.
I am hoping we do not prematurely celebrate data points as most governors are now doing, reminding everyone how they took down unemployment from 35% to 1% within 18 months!
In this age of rebasing methodologies, what do you think NBS will provide as Nigeria’s new GDP? I expect them to push it from the current number of $300 billion to around $700-800 billion. GDP rebasing loading…expect something interesting.
==From Twitter NBS Publication
The National Bureau of Statistics has released the rebased Consumer Price Index (CPI), reflecting an updated price reference period (base year) of 2024 and weight reference period of 2023.
Nigeria’s inflation rate for January 2024 stood at 24.48% year on year.
- Food Inflation rate stood at 26.08%
- Core Inflation rate stood at 22.59%
- Urban Inflation rate stood at 26.09%
- Rural Inflation rate stood at 22.15%
Special indices introduced and their inflation rates. (Base Period: 2024 = 100)
- Farm Produce – 10.50%
- All items less farm produce- 10.70%
- Energy index – 8.9%
- Services Index – 10.41%
- Imported food index – 11.47%
Note: the rates reported for the new indices are for January 2025 compared to the base year.
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It is called state capture, in a hostile way. They destroyed your currency, removed petrol subsidy, rewrite methodology for calculating unemployment rate, and then did same for inflation. They promised you inflation rate of 15% and $1 trillion economy, by the time they publish their new GDP after rebasing, you will be a stone throw away from $1 trillion. The children of lies have no business with truths anyway.
With the nice numbers and pretty much full employment, will they stop sending N20k and N50k to people in their poverty register? The number of recipients can only grow bigger, but yea, everywhere is stew now.
All the things they told you they would do, you will read the figures, if you cannot see or feel them, then you are on your own. If you don’t know the kind of people ruling you, you will remain shocked. This is who they are, were, and will always be. It’s up to you to make up your mind on how you want to view them.
You either conquer or be conquered, no middle ground.