Nigeria’s inflation landscape took an unexpected turn in September 2025 as food prices recorded their first monthly decline in over a decade.
Despite the rare relief in locally produced food items, the cost of imported food continued an unrelenting climb, reflecting sustained pressure from foreign exchange volatility and global market disruptions.
According to the latest Consumer Price Index report released by the National Bureau of Statistics, headline inflation fell sharply to 18.02 per cent, down from 20.12 per cent in August, the steepest month-on-month drop in recent years.
The key driver of the moderation was food inflation, which declined to 16.87 per cent in September, from 21.87 per cent in August.
The month-on-month food inflation rate stood at -1.57 per cent, signalling an actual fall in food prices, a phenomenon last recorded in February 2012, when food inflation dipped to -0.13 per cent.
NBS attributed the rare decline to the harvest season across key farming regions, which boosted the supply of staples such as rice, yams, maize, and vegetables. Increased availability of these food items typically exerts downward pressure on prices during the third quarter of the year.
It also noted that the recent rebasing of the inflation basket, which updated the list of goods and services used to calculate inflation, helped reflect current consumer spending patterns more accurately.
The technical change, combined with statistical base effects from last year’s high inflation levels, amplified the slowdown.
While Nigerians saw some relief in the prices of locally produced food, the cost of imported food items continued to rise, reflecting the sustained pressure on foreign exchange and global supply costs.
The Imported Food Price Index climbed from 111.5 points in January to 124.1 points in September 2025, representing an 11.3 per cent increase over the nine-month period.
On a month-on-month basis, the index rose by 3.4 per cent, up from 120.0 points recorded in August, indicating persistent inflationary pressure on imported food items.
Month by month, imported food prices showed no signs of easing, advancing to 113.4 points in February, 113.9 in March, 115.3 in April, 113.7 in May, 116.7 in June, 118.5 in July, and 120.0 in August.
The sharp contrast underscores the dual nature of Nigeria’s inflation problem, while domestic harvests offer reprieve, dependence on imported staples like wheat, sugar, and dairy products keeps household budgets under strain.
This comes despite the government’s earlier stance to allow the importation of food items as a strategy to stabilise supply and drive down local prices, a policy move that was expected to ease pressure on consumers but now appears to be fuelling concerns about rising import costs and exchange rate volatility.
Meanwhile, the Minister of State for Agriculture and Food Security, Aliyu Sabi, has attributed the recent drop in food prices across the country to increased local production, improved government interventions, and the onset of the harvest season.
Sabi, speaking to journalists, explained that the ongoing price reduction is a direct result of large-scale agricultural investments initiated since 2023 under the National Agricultural Growth Scheme Agro-Pocket programme.
‘From 2023, we embarked on massive production through the NAGS Agro-Pocket programme. We injected almost 500,000 metric tonnes or more of wheat, including maize, cassava, and other commodities we promoted. This ramped-up production is what’s responsible for the drop in food prices’, the minister said.
The minister also clarified that the import window opened last year was only meant to cover production deficits, debunking speculations that the government imported food to crash prices.
‘What government did was to allow a limited import window to bridge the deficit. But I can tell you for a fact that the imported items have not even been released. The claims that imported food is what crashed prices are not true. Because people heard that government was going to import food, those who were hoarding began to release their stock. When supply increases, prices naturally come down’, he said.
Sabi also linked the price decline to the current harvest season, which traditionally ushers in a period of food abundance.
‘We are now in the harvest period, starting from the southern part of the country to the central and northern regions. During this period, food prices will continue to fall’, he asserted.
