What Does Food Cost in Abuja?

The harvest is the biggest thing in this data

The single largest movement in twelve months of prices was not caused by the currency, the diesel price or a policy decision. It was caused by rain and planting.

Between July and September last year, in our North Central series, garri fell by about half. Beans fell by more than a third. Maize fell by roughly a third, yam by a fifth, onions and sweet potatoes by close to a fifth each. Over the same two months bread, frozen chicken, cooking oil and eggs barely moved at all.

That divide is the whole story. What collapsed was the field crops arriving from the main harvest; what held steady was everything processed, packaged or imported, which is priced on inputs that do not have a season. The National Bureau of Statistics attributed the falls to improved harvest yields and increased supply, and named the North-central and North-west as the regions where it showed up most — which is to say, the zone Abuja buys from.

Then it reversed, gradually, from January onward, as stored stock drew down and the next planting season had not yet delivered.

Two things follow, and both are about how to read this page rather than what to expect from it.

First, a year-on-year food figure in Nigeria is measured against whatever the harvest was doing twelve months earlier. June's 17.52 per cent is partly a real increase and partly a low base — the comparison month sits near the bottom of last year's fall. A number can rise because this year got worse or because last year got unusually good, and those deserve different reactions.

Second, month-on-month movement in staples between roughly August and November is normal and does not mean the cost-of-living problem has been solved, any more than the climb from January means it has returned. One point is not a trend, and one season is not a direction.

We are not going to forecast this year's harvest. We will show you what the series does, with the dates attached, and let the pattern speak.

— abuja.cool desk

Two Abujas, and a pot of jollof between them

The most Abuja-specific number we can source is not a food price at all. It is the cost of making one pot of jollof rice, priced in two of the city's markets by SBM Intelligence.

In Wuse II — central, near the offices and the embassies — that pot costs about ₦29,200. In Nyanya, out on the eastern corridor towards Nasarawa where a very large share of the FCT's workforce actually sleeps, the same pot costs about ₦25,450.

Roughly ₦3,750 apart. Fifteen per cent, for identical ingredients, twenty-odd kilometres apart, in the same city, in the same month.

That gap is not a market inefficiency waiting to be arbitraged away. It is the geography of Abuja rendered in the price of rice. Wuse II sits where the money is and prices accordingly; Nyanya serves people who commute into the city precisely because they cannot afford to live in it, and its prices reflect what those customers can bear. The people who most need the cheaper market are the ones who have to leave the city to reach it.

Worth putting in a national frame, from the same survey and the same month: Trade Fair in Lagos is around ₦34,700 and Port Harcourt around ₦31,200, both dearer than either Abuja market. Onitsha at roughly ₦22,550 and Kano at ₦25,820 are cheaper. Abuja is not Nigeria's most expensive city to eat in — it sits in the middle, with an unusually wide internal spread. For a capital that is only fifty years old and grew outward from a plan, that spread is close to a map of the city itself.

— abuja.cool desk