Nigeria’s headline inflation is projected to rise sharply to 37 per cent in 2026, according to the International Monetary Fund, which issued the forecast in its April 2025 World Economic Outlook report released on Tuesday.
The IMF said the new projection follows the rebasing of Nigeria’s Consumer Price Index by the National Bureau of Statistics in January 2025, and warned that persistent price pressures and structural constraints would likely keep inflation elevated over the medium term.
According to the Fund, inflation, which averaged 33.2 per cent in 2024, is expected to moderate slightly to 26.5 per cent in 2025 before surging to 37.0 per cent the following year.
The projection, however, has drawn mixed reactions from Nigerian economists, some of whom described the outlook as “excessively pessimistic” and detached from domestic policy realities.
The IMF report also downgraded Nigeria’s economic growth forecast for 2025, citing weakening global oil prices as a major risk to the country’s fiscal and external balances.
The Fund revised its 2025 GDP growth forecast for Nigeria downward by 0.2 percentage point to 3.0 per cent, down from 3.2 per cent.
