By Hassan Aaliyah, Maryam Saheed, Oyekanmi Islamiyat Ayomide, Sulyman AWAL IBRAHIM, Abubakar Abdulsamad Ayomide, Chioma Sophia, Adebayo Sultan, Solihu Kausar, Maryam Ayomide AbdulAzeez, Rokibah Opeyemi Ibidokun & Oluwaferanmi Kolade
Nigeria’s inflation rate has moderated, but conversations with traders and consumers in Ilorin reveal a far less straightforward reality, with seasonal foods becoming cheaper in some stalls while other prices remain high, customers reduce what they buy, and traders struggle to protect margins against transport, restocking and spoilage costs.
At the market in Ilorin, Mrs Tawakalitu does not need an inflation index to explain what has happened to the value of money. Her measure is the ₦10,000 she takes shopping and the increasingly limited assortment of food it allows her to bring home.
There was a time, she recalled, when that amount could pay for rice and semovita and still leave enough for other items. Today, she said, a shopper might buy only a few essentials, perhaps garri and beans, before most of the money is exhausted. Getting to and from the market has become more expensive too: journeys she remembered costing between ₦100 and ₦250 can now require ₦300, ₦500 or, depending on the distance, as much as ₦1,000.
Yet a few stalls away, the economic story can look remarkably different. One yam seller at Oja-Oba said three tubers that had sold for about ₦8,000 roughly three months earlier were going for around ₦4,000 at the time of the interview, meaning that ₦10,000 could buy about six tubers instead of roughly three. A pepper seller in the same market described a similar reversal, saying a basket that previously sold for about ₦4,000 had fallen to roughly ₦1,500. Both traders attributed the declines primarily to seasonal availability and increased supply.
Those contrasting accounts form the most important finding from reporting in Ilorin: there is no single experience of food inflation inside a market. Some prices are falling, others remain stubbornly high, while still others vary according to the period in which a trader bought stock, the quantity being measured, the source of supply and the particular goods a household needs. What appears more consistent across many of the conversations is not that every commodity is becoming more expensive, but that households remain highly sensitive to price and increasingly adjust the quantity or composition of what they buy.
That picture is particularly significant at a time when Nigeria’s national inflation statistics are moving in a direction that might, at first glance, suggest improving conditions. The National Bureau of Statistics puts headline inflation at 15.91 percent, marginally below 15.93 percent previously, while food inflation moved higher to 17.52 percent from 16.96 percent. The country’s Consumer Price Index was rebased with 2024 as its price reference year, a methodological change intended to make the basket better reflect current consumption patterns.
A slower inflation rate, however, does not mean that prices have returned to where they were before the recent cost-of-living shock. It means that prices, across the basket being measured, are rising at a slower rate. That distinction becomes visible inside Oja-Oba, where one trader can report cheaper yam while a shopper still feels that her overall food budget has lost purchasing power.
Mrs Amina, who sells rice, beans, spaghetti, oil, seasoning and other food items around the Oja-Oba area, said a bag of rice was selling for about ₦54,000 when she was interviewed. She recalled a dramatically lower price many years earlier, but because that historical comparison reaches back to the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan and does not establish an equivalent rice type, weight and precise date, it is more useful as a recollection of how much prices have changed over time than as a like-for-like inflation measurement. What is more immediately relevant is Amina’s observation that customers complain about prices and that she records stronger sales whenever food is cheaper. She attributed much of the pressure she sees in her business to transportation costs, customs duties and government regulations.
Her customer, Mrs Sanni from Olore, expressed the problem from the other side of the transaction. When goods become too expensive, she said, consumers cannot simply obtain everything they want, even as sellers must charge prices that reflect what they themselves paid for stock. The exchange complicates the common assumption that food inflation is simply a contest between traders raising prices and consumers resisting them. In many cases, both sides of the transaction are responding to costs neither completely controls.
The yam trade offers an even clearer example of why a market analysis can become misleading when different voices are forced into one conclusion. While the Oja-Oba seller who linked recent price declines to the rainy season said three tubers had fallen from about ₦8,000 to ₦4,000, another seller, Miss Fathia, reported exactly the opposite experience. She said a tuber that had previously cost between ₦1,500 and ₦2,000 was selling for around ₦4,000, while what she described as a bulk purchase had risen from about ₦80,000 to somewhere between ₦150,000 and ₦200,000. Fathia attributed her experience primarily to the higher cost of buying yam from farmers and transporting it to market, adding that customers continued to buy but increasingly took smaller quantities.
Neither account necessarily cancels out the other. The interviews may have been conducted at different moments in the supply cycle; the tubers may have differed in size or variety; the traders may buy from different producing communities or at different points in the distribution chain. Without standardising those variables, the evidence cannot responsibly support a declaration that yam prices everywhere in Ilorin are either rising or falling. What it does show is a market in which traders can experience substantially different price movements even when selling the same broad commodity.
Pepper tells much the same story.
One Oja-Oba trader said increased seasonal availability had brought the price of a basket down from roughly ₦4,000 to ₦1,500 and argued that improving agricultural production would ultimately increase supply. “Once enough farmers are able to harvest, there will be enough,” the trader said.
Mama Tolu, another pepper seller at Oja-Oba in Ilorin, described a markedly different calculation. Her account covered a bag of red pepper rather than the basket measured by the other seller, and she said her buying price had risen from approximately ₦18,000 to ₦35,000 over about two months. Transport for each bag, she reported, increased from around ₦2,000 to ₦3,500, while the cost of baskets and nylon packaging also went up. She associated those increases with diesel costs, poor roads and reduced farm yield during the period.
The two pepper accounts should not be treated as contradictory price quotations for the same unit, because they measure different quantities over different reference periods. They nevertheless illustrate why household experience can diverge sharply from one stall or transaction to another. A seasonal glut can make a particular retail quantity cheaper while another trader, sourcing a different volume or grade and restocking at another point in the supply chain, simultaneously experiences higher procurement costs.
More revealing in Mama Tolu’s account is what happened to her profit. She estimated that she previously made about ₦8,000 on a bag but now makes closer to ₦4,000, even though the prices paid by customers have increased. Her costs, she said, have risen faster than her returns.
That calculation challenges another popular assumption about inflation: that higher prices automatically translate into higher earnings for the person behind the stall. For a small trader who must replace stock at a higher price, pay more to transport it and absorb losses from unsold perishables, raising the retail price can be an attempt to preserve the business rather than evidence of a widening margin.
Mama Tolu’s response has been to change the way she sells. Instead of relying only on larger measures, she offers smaller quantities and mixed pepper, tomato and onion packs. She said customers who previously bought a full paint measure increasingly ask for half a paint or smaller “derica” quantities, while some turn to dry pepper or mixtures that stretch their spending differently. She also buys stock more frequently rather than carrying a week’s supply that could spoil, sources directly from farms when possible and uses WhatsApp pre-orders to secure customers before taking some products to market.
The significance of those changes extends beyond pepper. They show how inflation and weak purchasing power can alter the unit in which food is traded. A household does not always respond to a higher price by abandoning a product completely; it may instead reduce the quantity, buy enough for the next meal rather than the next week, substitute another ingredient or divide a previously larger purchase into several smaller transactions.
The same behaviour appears elsewhere in the interviews. Fathia said customers continued buying yam but in reduced quantities, while the meat trader interviewed for the research reported weaker patronage and fewer purchases from customers and resellers. This gradual compression of quantity may be one of the more consequential changes taking place in the market because it allows consumption to continue while concealing how much less food the same household budget may now provide.
Tomato seller Iyabo Olanrewaju also traced much of the pressure she sees to transportation. She put a large basket of tomatoes at about ₦30,000 and said a smaller, though not precisely standardised, quantity sold for roughly ₦1,500 to ₦2,000. Asked whether ₦10,000 could still buy enough tomatoes for a household, she said it could, but not as much as the same amount would have bought previously. Her answer captures a more subtle form of declining affordability: the product has not disappeared from the shopping basket, but the quantity the household carries home has contracted.
For meat traders, the chain of costs becomes more complicated. One long-time seller said cattle had become considerably more expensive and linked part of that increase to fuel and insecurity affecting the supply route. His interview notes contain an estimated rise in the price of a cow from about ₦150,000 to ₦800,000, but the comparison lacks a precise date and does not establish whether the animals were equivalent in size, weight or type, making it unsuitable as a standard market benchmark.
The trader’s description of how the business operates is more instructive. Fuel adds to the cost of moving cattle; vehicle breakdowns can delay journeys long enough for animals to lose weight or condition and, in extreme cases, die; customers sometimes take meat on credit and delay payment; and the absence of cold-storage facilities creates the risk that unsold meat will spoil. By the time meat reaches a household, therefore, its price may reflect not only the animal itself but also transportation, risk, storage limitations, credit exposure and the cost of replacing stock.
The seller called for improved security, lower fuel costs and cold-storage facilities, while also specifically linking cattle-sourcing difficulties to insecurity. Those explanations remain the trader’s assessment rather than a quantified measure of how much each factor contributes to meat prices, but his experience reinforces one of the most persistent themes across the interviews: transportation repeatedly appears in traders’ explanations of why doing business has become more expensive.
That theme cuts across rice, yam, pepper, tomatoes and meat, and it also appears in consumers’ accounts of their own movements around the city. Yet the reporting does not show every shopper experiencing the market in the same way.
One consumer interviewed at Oja-Oba believed conditions had improved in some respects compared with three months earlier. She recalled petrol costing roughly ₦1,320 per litre previously and about ₦1,220 at the time of the interview, while she also reported paying around ₦8,000 for a quantity of noodles that she remembered costing ₦10,500 three months earlier. Because the noodle quantity and brand were not standardised in the interview, the figures are best treated as her experience rather than as a formal commodity-price comparison.
Another consumer interviewed in the same reporting described almost the opposite reality. She said rice remained particularly expensive and estimated that ₦10,000 could now buy only two or three food items in small quantities. On one shopping trip, she said, she had intended to spend ₦5,000 but eventually spent ₦8,000, an outcome she associated partly with government policies and fuel prices.
Their disagreement is important because households do not consume the inflation index itself. They purchase individual combinations of rice, beans, garri, meat, yam, pepper, oil, vegetables and other necessities, and those combinations differ according to income, household size and preference. One shopper may benefit immediately from a seasonal decline in yam or pepper while another, whose basket is weighted more heavily towards rice or meat, feels little improvement.
Yusuf Sulaiman, who identified himself during his interview as a military officer, explained the same problem through income rather than commodity prices. He recalled earning about ₦3,000 when he entered military service and said he now earns more than ₦300,000, yet he believes the purchasing power of that income has been significantly eroded by the cost of feeding a household alongside school fees, assistance to parents and other obligations. His personal salary history cannot establish a wider trend in Nigerian real wages, but it illustrates the difference between nominal earnings and what those earnings can actually provide.
That gap between improving macroeconomic indicators and household experience has also been recognised at the national level. In its April 2026 Nigeria Development Update, the World Bank said Nigeria had made meaningful progress in restoring macroeconomic stability and that inflation had eased markedly, but added that household incomes had yet to recover fully and poverty remained high. The Central Bank of Nigeria, meanwhile, retained its Monetary Policy Rate at 26.5 percent at its July 20-21 meeting, maintaining a restrictive monetary stance as inflation remains an important policy concern.
Those national indicators provide useful context, but the consequences of changing prices become more tangible at Oja-Oba and in the households that depend on it. Ilorin, the capital of Kwara State, is not represented by a single trader or consumer, and the interviews do not constitute a statistical survey of the city. What they offer instead is a close view of the calculations taking place at the point where macroeconomic change becomes a daily transaction.
Some of those calculations produce apparently contradictory answers. Yam is cheaper for one trader and more expensive for another. One pepper seller sees abundant supply lowering prices while another faces a near doubling of her procurement cost. One consumer believes the market has improved, while another arrives with ₦5,000 and leaves having spent ₦8,000. A trader can increase her selling price and still see her profit fall.
Taken together, those differences do not weaken the market story; they are the market story. They show an economy in which seasonality can bring temporary relief to one commodity even as transportation and replacement costs put pressure on another, and in which improvements in the national inflation rate do not automatically restore the purchasing power households lost during earlier periods of rapid price increases.
For shoppers such as Mrs Tawakalitu, the distinction is ultimately measured less by whether an inflation rate has risen or fallen than by what remains possible after the money in hand is divided among food, transportation and the other obligations of daily life. Her ₦10,000 may still buy something, just as another shopper may find that seasonal yam or pepper has become cheaper, but the calculation increasingly turns on quantity: how much rice can be afforded, how much pepper must be reduced, whether meat still fits into the basket, and what has to wait until another day.
Aaliyah, Saheed, Ayomide, Ibrahim, Ayomide, Sophia, Sultan, Kausar, AbdulAzeez, Ibidokun & Kolade are all of Craft Posts, a title of Craft Innovation Hub
