The inflation rate of Africa’s most popular country, Nigeria has soared for the eighth consecutive month, smashing a fresh 17-year-high amid rising food and energy costs, and a further depreciating naira.
According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics which was obtained by Africa Daily News, New York, inflation soared to 20.77 percent in September from 20.52 percent recorded in August, the highest since 2005.
Food inflation rose 23.34 percent year-on-year compared with 23.1 percent in August, while core inflation rose to 17.6 percent in September from 17.2 percent in August.
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Meanwhile, upward pressures may see the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Monetary Policy Committee raise borrowing costs for the fourth successive time in November.
Every minute, more than six Nigerians enter the extreme poverty bracket as the number of poor persons in the country race towards the 95.1 million projected this year by the World Bank
According to the World Bank, in its latest 2022 Poverty and Prosperity Report, Nigeria contributed three million people to global extreme poverty, while the country is “home to a large share of the global extreme poor.”
Also, at the weekend, Nigeria was ranked 103 out of 121 countries in the 2022 Global Hunger Index (GHI), a position that signifies the nation has a level of hunger that is serious. The Global Hunger Index was jointly published by the German-based Welthungerhilfe and Dublin-based Concern Worldwide on Saturday to mark the World Food Day.
The report, which ranks countries by ‘severity’, gave Nigeria a score of 27.3 – a hunger level falling under the ‘serious’ category.
The index has five levels of hunger under which each country falls – low, moderate, serious, alarming, and extremely alarming. This is the second consecutive year in which Nigeria’s ranking on the scale remains the same. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, ranked 103 out of 116 countries in 2021 and 98 among 107 countries in 2020.
At the beginning of this year, the number of poor Nigerians had increased to 91 million, with the World Bank estimating that an additional one million people were pushed into poverty in Nigeria from June to November 2021.
Africa Daily News, New York reports that the latest figure of the poverty index, nearly half of the country’s estimated population of about 214 million, had jumped from 89 million, given by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in May 2020. This means that 6.1 million more persons would have fallen beneath the poverty line in two years, making it the poverty capital of the world.
While India has more people living below the United Nations estimated poverty line of $2 due to its large population, by percentage, the country at barely six per cent, comes second behind Nigeria at 32 per cent.
It was stated that the poverty rate had been aided by the impact of the COVID-19 crisis and the growing population. Today, October 17, marks the 30th International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (IDEP) established by UN.
