Business
Don Gives Reasons For Rising Inflation In Nigeria

A Professor of Economics at the University of Port Harcourt, Okey Onuchukwu, has said that the disruption in the food supply chain and increase in price of petrol are responsible for the rising inflation rate in the country.
Onuchukwu stated this in a chat with newsmen in his response to the country’s inflation rate of 13.22 per cent as announced by the National Bureau of Statistics.
The professor attributed the rise in exchange rate to the current inflation levels
According to him, “basically the increase in the cost of food in the market, necessitated by the COVID-19 is virtually what led to the rise in food inflation. The food inflation is also rising particularly with the increase in the pump price of petroleum products. People use Premium Motor Spirit, (PMS), for transportation, they use PMS to run generator, they use PMS to run all kinds of machine…’
Onuchukwu, a former director of University of Port Harcourt Business School, enjoined the Federal Government to formulate policies that would encourage production and reduce the rising inflation.
“What we can do is to ensure that there are policies that will encourage production, because production is the key thing in the economy, whether in the agricultural sector, in the manufacturing sector or in the private sector, the key thing is to increase production. For instance, for us to come out of increased inflation in food, we must increase agricultural products available to feed the people… our manufacturing sector too, the contribution to the Gross Domestic Product is very low, we need to step up the production in the manufacturing industry. So the key to run away from this economic quagmire in Nigeria is to ensure that policies are geared towards increasing production in the system’’, he said.
Meanwhile, traders lament that the demand for food has reduced drastically, explaining that a bag of garri now goes for N35,000, while a bag of rice which used to be N36,000 now goes for N50,000.
Residents in Port Harcourt are already crying out over the effect of the sharp increase in prices of food items in the market.
They said the development had forced them to reduce the number of times they eat.