A new survey carried out by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) foresees a gradual drop in Nigeria’s inflation rate over the next six months.
This is contained in its newly released report on inflation expectations for February 2025.
According to the report, businesses and household respondents expect the level of inflation to gradually reduce over the next six months.
The respondents also anticipated lower spending as their expenditure gradually decreased over the next six months.
Further analysis by income distribution indicated that more households earning above N200,000 per month perceived inflation to be moderating.
The survey carried out by the apex bank showed that this is driven by factors such as energy costs, exchange rate, transportation costs, interest rate and insecurity influenced their perception of the inflation rate in the month under review.
The apex bank, however said 65.1 per cent of respondents want a reduction in interest rate by the financial institution.
At the last meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), the policymakers had paused the interest rate at 27.50 per cent.
This may be on course as the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in its Consumer Price Index (CPI) report for March said the inflation rate for February dropped to 23.18 per cent year-on-year in February 2025, reflecting a second consecutive monthly decline from the 24.48 per cent recorded in January.
This figure marks a significant 8.52 percentage point decrease from the 31.70 per cent seen in February 2024, following the adoption of a new CPI rebasing methodology which changed the base year to 2024 compared to 2009.
Also, the CBN in its Business Expectations Survey Report for February 2025, listed high interest rates as recording the highest rate with 75 per cent of the respondents.
Insecurity followed with 73.9 per cent, insufficient power supply recorded 73.8 per cent, and high taxes with 73 per cent.
Respondents identified financial challenges as taking 68.5 per cent, with high bank charges recording 76.6 per cent.