The price has changed again: How Nigeria’s inflation crisis is dismantling lived

By Chioma Obinagwam

It is 5:47 in the morning at Mile 12 International Market, Lagos, and the city has not yet decided to be awake. A thin mist hangs over the corrugated iron rooftops. The gutters still hold last night’s rain. The generators have not started. For one brief, rare moment, Lagos is almost quiet.

Adaeze Nwosu moves through the silence with the practiced efficiency of a woman who has done this eleven years in a row. She is 44. She has a small scar above her left eyebrow from the day a bag of rice fell on her during unloading — her initiation, she calls it. Her stall is narrow: two wooden planks across oil drums, a tarpaulin overhead, a handwritten price sign she updates almost daily. It used to say ₦32,000. Now it says nothing. The price changes too fast for signs.

She unlocks the padlock on the iron sheet that serves as her door, pulls out two 50kg bags of local parboiled rice, and props them against the counter. Two bags. She used to bring out six. Then her phone buzzes. A WhatsApp message from her supplier in Kano, a man called Alhaji Musa who she has never met in person but to whom she owes her livelihood. She reads it. Her face does something that is not quite an expression — a small hardening, a brief stillness — before she tucks the phone into her wrapper.

The price has changed. Again.
“The price has changed. Again.”
In that single sentence — unremarkable in a market stall, devastating when you understand what it means — lies the whole story of Nigeria in 2025 and 2026. It is a story not of policy charts or ministerial press releases, though both will have their place here. It is a story of a country eating itself from the inside, one naira at a time. It is a story of what happens when the cost of living outpaces the will to live the life you had planned.
This is that story.

The Woman and the Rice
Adaeze Nwosu, Trader, Mile 12 Market
Adaeze’s mother sold rice at this same stall for nineteen years before her knees gave out and she handed the business to her daughter. The stall came with three things: a wooden counter, a battered digital scale, and a capital of ₦180,000. That was 2014. Adaeze treated that money like it was sacred, because it was.

It was her mother’s life savings, compressed into a single inheritance.
For years, the stall worked. At her peak — 2021, the year before everything began to unravel — Adaeze moved fifteen 50kg bags of rice a week. On a good Saturday, she could clear five bags before noon. She had a regular set of customers: the caterers who came in bulk, the housewives who came fortnightly, the small chop sellers who came twice a week. She knew their names. She extended credit to some of them. She had started saving to add a second stall.
Then came the reforms.

In May 2023, President Bola Tinubu’s administration removed Nigeria’s longstanding fuel subsidy and unified the foreign exchange market. The intentions were defensible: the subsidy was costing the country over ₦4 trillion annually, and the multiple exchange rates had created a shadowy parallel economy. But the immediate effects landed on ordinary Nigerians like a concrete slab. Fuel prices tripled within weeks. Transport costs surged.

The naira, suddenly floating freely, began to fall — and fall — and fall. From roughly ₦465 to the dollar at the start of 2023, the official rate crashed to over ₦1,600 by late 2024. Every imported good became more expensive. And Nigeria imports almost everything: rice, cooking oil, machinery, spare parts, medicine.
The price of a 50kg bag of local rice — not imported, local — rose from approximately ₦32,000 in 2022 to ₦55,000 by mid-2023.

By January 2024, it had climbed to ₦70,000. By December 2024, at the peak of the crisis, the same bag cost ₦100,000 in Lagos markets. In three years, the price of rice had tripled.
“I used to budget ₦192,000 to buy six bags,” Adaeze says, arranging her display in the morning light. “Now that same ₦192,000 cannot even buy three bags. I have to choose: buy fewer bags, or borrow to buy the same number and pray that prices don’t crash before I sell them.”

It is the second fear — the crash — that haunts her more than the rise.
The Cruelty of the Price Crash
Most people assume that when prices fall, traders rejoice. In Adaeze’s world, the opposite is often true. In May 2025, a surge of imported Indian rice flooded Nigerian markets following a partial policy reversal on import duties. The price of a 50kg bag crashed from above ₦80,000 to as low as ₦54,000 within weeks. Government spokespersons hailed it as evidence that the economy was stabilising.

Adaeze had bought four bags the week before at ₦82,000 each, spending ₦328,000 of borrowed and saved capital. She now had to sell them at ₦65,000 to stay competitive — a loss of ₦17,000 per bag, ₦68,000 total. Her profit for that month was negative.

“I bought several bags at ₦80,000 and ₦85,000 early this year, and now I have to sell them for as low as ₦65,000. We are selling at a loss.” — Mrs Precious Okoro, rice dealer, Arena Market, Lagos
According to a NAN report.

By July 2025, prices had surged back above ₦80,000. By late 2025, they had stabilised in the ₦60,000–₦85,000 range depending on brand and week. The volatility was, in many ways, as destructive as the high prices. A trader cannot plan around a number that means something different each Monday.