Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has announced that the inflation rate for month of May this year dropped to 22.97 per cent.
The NBS said in its monthly report of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) which measures inflation that the figure in May represented a decline of 0.74 percentage points when compared to the figure of 23.71 per cent recorded in April 2025.
It noted that on a year-on-year basis, the headline inflation fell by 10.98 percentage points from 33.95 per cent recorded in May 2024.
According to the NBS, the decline in the inflation rate was largely driven by a slowdown in the rate of increase in the average prices of goods and services.
“On a month-on-month basis, the headline inflation rate stood at 1.53 per cent in May 2025, lower than the 1.86 per cent recorded in April. This indicates that while prices continued to rise, they did so at a slower pace compared to the previous month. Food inflation remained a major driver of overall inflation. The food inflation rate stood at 21.14 per cent year-on-year in May, a sharp drop from 40.66 per cent recorded in the same month last year,” the NBS said.
The NBS, however, attributed the sharp annual drop to the change in the base year, following the CPI rebasing.
On a month-on-month basis, food inflation rose to 2.19 per cent in May, up from 2.06 per cent in April, driven by increases in the prices of yam, cassava, maize flour, sweet potatoes, fresh pepper, and ogbono.
It report added that urban inflation stood at 23.14 per cent year-on-year, down than 36.34 per cent in May 2024, while Monthly urban inflation was 1.40 per cent in May, slightly higher than the 1.18 per cent recorded in April.
In addition, rural inflation also dropped to 22.70 per cent year-on-year from 31.82 per cent in the corresponding period of 2024. On a monthly basis, rural inflation slowed to 1.83 per cent from 3.56 per cent in April.
GIK/APA