The Statistician-General of the Federation, Adeyemi Adeniran, has advised Nigerians to disregard reports that inflation has come down.
News360 Info reports that Adeniran explained that the report the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released was not the current inflation rate in the country.
In an interview with Arise News, on Tuesday night, he stated that NBS did not say prices of goods have come down in markets. He said what the report measured was how fast the price of goods is increasing in the country using the 2024 base.
He further explained that NBS decided to dump the 2009 base for the 2024 base to provide accurate data measuring the current inflationary pressures within the economy.
“The present government has been coming out with policies just to make things work better for the country. And there’s nothing wrong in that projection that government made. What we are doing as a responsible statistics office is to provide data, accurate data, that reflect present inflationary pressure within the economy. The government can now use to drive the objective of achieving that goal,” he said.
The Statistician-General of the Federation explained that in the 2024 base 960 items were collected into a basket of measurement and assigned weights.
He stressed that the new inflation report said that inflation remained high but prices are moving up slowly.
“When we talk about rebasing, as I said, we are moving from 2009, that was the old basing, to 2024. In the 2009 goods and services, the basket that we have, we have 740 items in that basket. In this newly rebased period, 2024, we have 960 items in the basket. And the weight assigned to each of these products in the basket is not the same. So to that extent, we cannot be comparing the 2009 base year result, which gave us 34.8% in December with this current January 2025 inflation rates. So they are not comparable. So saying that inflation moved from 34.8% to 24.48% is not the interpretation.
“We are coming with a new inflation rate for the country that showed the present inflationary pressure in the economy. So that government knows what actually is the correct situation.
“So the new inflation rate is saying that prices are moving up, but in a slower rate. That’s what inflation measures. Inflation is measuring when prices are going up. At what rate are those prices moving up? You may have in a particular month, depending on the situation, the price will be moving rapidly, changing rapidly. And in another month or period of the year, you will see inflation not moving. The prices can still be going up, but not as much as it used to be. That’s what inflation is measuring. The rate at which prices are moving,” he stated.
He dismissed the misinterpretation of the report that food prices have come down.
He continued, “It’s different from the actual prices that people are paying for goods and services. So as we said, inflation is 24.48%. It doesn’t mean the prices of goods and services in the market have changed. But the rate by which some of the items are changing prices is what inflation is measuring. So we are not saying prices have come down generally in the market.”
