Some Nigerian households spend as much as 120 per cent of their income on food, forcing them to borrow money or depend on relatives to survive, the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Taiwo Oyedele, has said.
Oyedele made the disclosure at Chatham House in London, citing a government survey. “In fact, there was a survey we did that shows that up to 120 per cent of household income is spent on food. Like, how do you spend 120 per cent of your income? You borrow food before the end of the month,” he said.
The minister paired the finding with the country’s labour statistics to argue that poverty in Nigeria is increasingly a problem of the working poor. He said the poverty rate remained above 50 per cent even as unemployment stood at about five per cent. “That tells you something. As a policymaker, you don’t sit back and say we don’t have unemployment. You have working poor,” he said.
The claim has drawn scrutiny from some economists, who have disagreed with the 120 per cent figure, but it aligns with independent assessments of the pressure on household budgets. The World Bank puts the number of Nigerians below the national poverty line at 104 million.
Food inflation stood at 19.6 per cent in September, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, and Oyedele argued that the disconnect between official inflation readings and lived experience lies in what families actually buy. “Headline inflation is falling faster than the price of a basket of tomatoes, gari, and beans. And this widens inequality,” he said. Headline inflation fell to 14.63 per cent in September, the fourth consecutive monthly decline, yet food prices, the largest item in household budgets, have kept climbing.
“Macroeconomic stability means little to a mother who still cannot afford food,” the minister added.
Oyedele attributed the pressure on households to high food prices, which he said were not falling as quickly as headline inflation, and traced the problem to structural weaknesses rather than taxation. He said Nigeria had no taxes on fuel, arguing that the pressure on household budgets was linked to deeper structural problems.
He identified low agricultural yields, seasonal farming, post-harvest losses, poor storage and logistics, high transport costs and insecurity in farming communities as the major factors driving food prices. As an example of the scale of the losses, he cited post-harvest losses of up to 60 per cent for tomatoes, meaning much of what farmers produce never reaches the market at an affordable price.
On measures to address the situation, Oyedele said the government was investing in agricultural technology, irrigation to support year-round farming, improved storage facilities and access to finance for smallholder farmers. The aim, he said, is to raise yields and cut the losses that inflate prices between the farm and the table.
In the short term, the administration is providing direct support through a cash transfer programme that has reached more than 10 million households. “Payments are made digitally and beneficiaries are verified with National Identification Numbers to reduce leakage,” he said.
The minister said the government was prioritising agriculture and non-tradable services, which together employ 81.4 per cent of working Nigerians, with the aim of growing the two sectors faster than the overall economy, raising incomes and gradually reducing dependence on cash transfers.
The remarks come at a delicate moment for the administration’s economic narrative. Headline inflation has now declined for four straight months, and officials have presented the disinflation as evidence that reforms are working. Oyedele’s own admission that a basket of tomatoes tells a different story from the consumer price index amounts to a rare official acknowledgment that the headline number is not the number families feel.
It also frames the policy dilemma. The structural fixes the minister listed, from irrigation to storage to rural security, are long-term projects whose costs are measured in years, while the households spending more than they earn on food need relief this month. That gap between the timeline of reform and the timeline of hunger is the challenge the cash transfer programme is meant to bridge, and its reach, past 10 million households, will be judged against the scale of the need.