Nigeria's inflation rate increased to 33.95% in May, driven primarily by surging prices of food and non-alcoholic beverages, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in its latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) report released on Saturday. This marks a slight rise from April's inflation rate of 33.69%.

"Comparing month-over-month data, the headline inflation rate in May 2024 increased by 0.26 percentage points from April 2024," stated the NBS. "Year-over-year, the headline inflation rate was 11.54 percentage points higher than the 22.41% recorded in May 2023."

The report further highlighted that on a month-to-month basis, May's headline inflation rate was 2.14%, a slight decrease from April's 2.29%. This indicates that while prices are still rising, the pace of increase slowed compared to the previous month.

Food and non-alcoholic beverages were the top contributors to headline inflation, accounting for 17.59%. Housing, water, electricity, gas, and other fuels followed with 5.68%, while clothing and footwear (2.60%), transport (2.21%), and furnishings, household equipment, and maintenance (1.71%) rounded out the top five contributors.

The NBS reported that urban inflation rose to 36.34% in May, up 12.61 percentage points from 23.74% in May 2023. Month-to-month, urban inflation was 2.35% in May, down 0.32 percentage points from April’s 2.67%.

Rural inflation was reported at 31.82% year-over-year in May, an increase of 10.63 percentage points from the 21.19% recorded in May 2023.

Food inflation specifically soared to 40.66% in May, up from 24.82% in the same month last year—a rise of 15.84 percentage points. The NBS attributed this increase to higher prices of staple foods such as semovita, oatflake, yam flour, garri, beans, Irish potatoes, yam, water yam, palm oil, vegetable oil, stockfish, mudfish, crayfish, beef head, live chicken, pork head, and bush meat.

On a month-to-month basis, food inflation was 2.28% in May, down from 2.50% in April.