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Nigeria’s inflation rate hits record high as food inflation soars

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3 years ago

March 16, 2021

Nigeria's inflation rate hits record high as food inflation soars

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Nigeria’s inflation rate rose to 17.33% in February 2021, from 16.47% recorded in the previous month, according to latest statistics released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

The latest figure represents the highest inflation rate recorded in four years.

Food inflation rose to 21.79% in February 2021 compared to 20.57% recorded in January 2021.

The ”All items less farm produce” or Core inflation, which excludes the prices of volatile agricultural produce stood at 12.38% in February 2021, up by 0.53% when compared with 11.85% recorded in January 2021.

Meanwhile, unemployment rate as of the end of 2020 rose to 33.3% from 27.1% recorded as of Q2 2020, indicating that about 23,187,389 (23.2 million) Nigerians remain unemployed.

This is according to the recently released labour force report published by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

Under-employment rate in the reference period however dropped from 28.6% recorded as at the second quarter 2020 to 22.8% in Q4 2020.

The report shows that the estimated number of persons in the economically active or working-age population (15 – 64 years of age) during the reference period of the survey, Q4, 2020 was 122,049,400.

A combination of both the unemployment and underemployment rate for the reference period gave a figure of 56.1%.

This means that 33.3% of the labour force in Nigeria or 23,187,389 persons either did nothing or worked for less than 20 hours a week, making them unemployed by our definition in Nigeria.

The increase in the unemployment rate figures can be attributed to the after-effect of the covid-19 induced lockdown which caused my organisations to reduce their work force as a means to cope amidst the pandemic.

Although businesses have resumed operations, they are yet to fully recover to pre-pandemic levels, indicating that some of these laid-off workers are still without work and 1.42 million others joined the group of unemployed in Q4 2020.