Inflation Drops from 34.8% to 24.48% in new NBS index

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has stated that Nigeria’s Headline Inflation dropped to 24.48 percent for the month of January. The bureau put food inflation at 26.08 percent year-on-year. Speaking during a press briefing on Tuesday in Abuja, the Statistician of the Federation and the CEO of NBS, Prince Adeyemi Adeniran, said the new […]

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has stated that Nigeria’s Headline Inflation dropped to 24.48 percent for the month of January.

The bureau put food inflation at 26.08 percent year-on-year.

Speaking during a press briefing on Tuesday in Abuja, the Statistician of the Federation and the CEO of NBS, Prince Adeyemi Adeniran, said the new figure was as result of the rebasing of Nigeria’s inflation basket to keep it updated to international standard.

He stated that the country last rebased its inflation in 2009, thus using prices of goods prominent during the period.

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“This rebasing process also allows Statistical Offices to introduce methodological enhancements to their computation procedures and align with global best practices.”

“Under this process, NBS is not only bringing the base year closer to the current period, from 2009 to 2024, but we have also introduced some critical methodology changes to improve the computation processes and quality of the estimates.

“Under the CPI, important enhancements have been made to the methodology. Some of the improvements include the transition to the latest version of the classification method, the Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose (COICOP) 2018 version, from the 1999 version of COICOP. The new version has 13 divisions, bringing in household expenditure on Insurance and Financial Services, which now has a weight of 0.5% relative to the total household expenditure. Another important improvement is the exclusion of own-production, imputed rents, and gifted items from the aggregates used to come up with the weights. This is because CPI is a monetary phenomenon. Hence, the computations should only include monetary expenditure. Also implemented under this rebasing is the movement of expenditures on meals away from home to the appropriate divisional class. These changes are quite significant and appropriately align expenditures to their respective classes, enabling price changes to be measured properly.”

While reiterating that the rebasing was free from political interference, he said January’s inflation would still have dropped if the rebasing was not carried out.