What Nigeria’s Inflation Crisis Looks Like From the Streets of Adamawa

The man behind the pharmacy counter has not turned away a sick patient in years. Not when drugs became expensive. Not when the naira collapsed. Not even when the patient standing in front of him has nothing in his pocket. Mr John, manager of L&L Pharmacy on Bacture Road in Kofare, Yola, writes the name in a ledger, hands over the medication, and waits for a payment that may arrive in days, weeks, or not at all.

Nigeria’s annual headline inflation eased to 15.10 percent in January 2026, down from 15.15 percent the previous month, marking the tenth consecutive monthly decline, the lowest level since November 2020. On paper, that sounds like a turning point. On the ground in Yola, it is a far more complicated story. Prices are not falling. They are simply rising more slowly. A family that could no longer afford beef in 2024 has not automatically recovered that purchasing power because beef inflation has decelerated in 2026. The losses are locked in; the relief has not arrived.

The crisis was years in the making, triggered by the removal of the petrol subsidy in May 2023, the naira unification and devaluation, and a public debt service burden that consumed over 90 percent of federal revenue in 2023, per the Debt Management Office. Under the old National Bureau of Statistics measurement method, Nigeria’s headline inflation peaked at approximately 34.8 percent in December 2024, the highest in nearly three decades. Adamawa State, consistently ranked among the poorest in Nigeria’s North East, absorbed every economic shock with less cushion than most.

The numbers coming out of Abuja have grown more encouraging. The Central Bank of Nigeria reduced its Monetary Policy Rate by 50 basis points to 26.5 percent at its 304th MPC meeting in February 2026, marking the 11th consecutive month of inflation decline, driven by contractionary monetary policy, stability in the foreign exchange market, robust capital inflows, and improvements in the balance of payments. Nigeria’s gross external reserves stood at $50.4 billion as of February 19, 2026, the highest in 13 years, capable of financing imports for over nine months. That is a significant macroeconomic achievement.

But macroeconomic stability and community-level survival are not the same thing, and in Adamawa, the gap between the two has never been wider.

The Counter That Never Closes

Mr John has watched the inflation crisis arrive at his counter, one desperate customer at a time. Fathers asking to split prescriptions across two visits. Mothers asking whether a cheaper generic version exists. Patients quietly wondering whether the drugs can wait until next week.

“Sometimes price can change if they bring drugs, but you have to make your patient understand the changes, so that they don’t just go and talk about your price is high,” he told The Gazette News.

Over 60 percent of Nigerians now struggle to afford essential medicines, with the average family spending 35 to 40 percent of their income on healthcare expenses, according to data cited in a BMC Health Services Research report. Nigeria’s pharmaceutical sector relies on imported active pharmaceutical ingredients for approximately 70 percent of its medicines, making it acutely vulnerable to every shift in the naira exchange rate. The cost of common drugs has reflected that vulnerability with brutal clarity. Between 2019 and 2023, the cost price of the common antibiotic Ampiclox surged by 1,390 percent, while its selling price rose by 1,100 percent.

When a patient cannot pay, Mr John does not send them away. “If they don’t have money to buy drugs, you can give them some days. They can go and bring it back later,” he said. This informal credit arrangement, invisible to every government health account, is one of the most consequential social safety mechanisms operating in Nigeria’s North East.

The formal system has not filled this gap. Nigeria’s 2026 federal budget allocates just ₦2.48 trillion to health, approximately 4.2 percent of the total ₦58.47 trillion national budget, far below the 15 percent benchmark agreed upon by African leaders under the Abuja Declaration of 2001. That commitment is now 25 years old, and Nigeria’s health spending, as a percentage of the national budget, has never come close to meeting it.

Between 2024 and 2025, health insurance premiums rose by between 8 and 59 percent across leading providers, with the average HMO plan jumping from N346,000 in 2024 to approximately N668,000 in 2025, following a 93 percent increase in capitation fees by the National Health Insurance Authority in April 2025. Less than 10 percent of Nigerians carry any form of health insurance, meaning the cost of financing healthcare falls almost entirely on individuals, and when prices rise, the burden lands hardest on those with the least.

Here is the number that should be in every policy meeting in Abuja. Nigeria’s 2026 health budget, at 4.2 percent of national spending, is actually lower in relative terms than what the country committed to a quarter century ago. The macroeconomy is stabilising. The healthcare safety net is still contracting. Ordinary Nigerians in places like Adamawa are bridging the gap with informal credit, prayer, and a pharmacist who still has not turned anyone away.

Mr John’s ask of government is pointed. “Maybe they will still employ more people to go for community mobilisation to check for the health of the citizens in the community,” he said. That is not an unreasonable request. That is a man watching people walk away without the drugs they came to buy, and asking the state to notice.

Making Business in a Hard Market

A few streets from L&L Pharmacy, Ify Obi runs Frank Bites on Atiku Way, a compact food business selling chin-chin, donuts, and cooked meals to students, traders, and working families navigating their own version of the inflation squeeze. She has watched her ingredient costs move with the open market, sometimes faster than any official index can track.

The pressure has eased, though it has not disappeared. “The price, you can’t compare with last year but okay, we are making business. Yes, making business too,” Obi told The Gazette News. That cautious optimism reflects what the NBS data confirmed in January 2026, when month-on-month food inflation contracted by 6.02 percent, driven by falling prices for yams, eggs, beans, beef, cassava, palm oil, and groundnut oil.

Beef remains the stubborn exception. Livestock price inflation, linked to fuel costs and ongoing insecurity in Nigeria’s cattle-rearing regions, has not followed the general downward trend. For a food business with beef on the menu, that is an unresolved daily squeeze on margins. Obi has held the line on quality, and the market has recognised it. “We have an increase, thank God. We have more customers. We didn’t lose any,” she said. “We give them our best.”

In an economy where purchasing power has eroded for three consecutive years, value has become the dominant criterion for consumers. Businesses that cut quality to protect margins lose customers faster than inflation itself takes them. Businesses that maintain quality retain loyalty. Ify Obi learned that lesson without attending a business school.

Her advice to young Adamawa residents is firm and immediate. “Before opening your own, make sure that you learn it. Don’t just go open it, if you open without learning it, you’ll be disappointed.” Youth unemployment in Adamawa remains among the highest in the North East zone, and thousands of young people have moved into food vending, tailoring, phone repairs, and digital services because the formal labour market cannot absorb them. She is not discouraging anyone; she is warning against the expensive mistake of starting without the skills to sustain.

Students Running on Empty

Across the campuses of Adamawa State, from Modibbo Adama University in Yola to the Federal Polytechnic Mubi and Adamawa State Polytechnic Yola, students are living inside a daily calculation with no easy answers. How to eat when food prices have doubled. How to stay connected when every naira must be rationed. How to remain enrolled when a monthly allowance set two years ago now buys less than half of what it once could.

NELFUND has disbursed over N206.29 billion to more than 1.16 million students across 265 institutions since the scheme’s inception, with the 2025/2026 application portal extended multiple times to accommodate institutions requiring additional processing time. The student loan programme was established after President Tinubu signed the legislation in April 2024, providing interest-free loans covering tuition and upkeep, with repayment triggered only after graduation and employment.

The principle is sound. The execution has been uneven. A student who applied in October 2025 and receives funds in March 2026 has, in real terms, received less than what was promised; the naira they eventually collect buys fewer textbooks, fewer meals, and less transport than it would have five months earlier. State scholarship payments have a structural history of arriving months late, and in an inflation environment, late money is reduced money.

A 2024 survey by the Education Rights Campaign found that over 60 percent of Nigerian university students were engaged in income-generating activities alongside their studies. In Adamawa, the evidence shows up in specific, visible ways. Landlords near MAU report rising rent defaults. Food vendors beside hostels say students negotiate harder for every naira. Booksellers confirm that photocopied handouts have largely replaced purchased textbooks. Data reselling, mobile phone repairs, event photography, and small-scale trading have shifted from side interests to survival strategies for thousands of students who never planned for it.

The Adamawa State Government has expanded its scholarship and bursary programmes in recent years, and those interventions have provided real, if partial, relief for beneficiaries. But partial relief still leaves a gap. And in an inflationary environment, gaps in financing are not neutral; they compound.

The Federal Ministries of Finance, Education, and Health, as well as the Adamawa State Ministry of Economic Planning, did not respond to requests for comment from The Gazette News as of press time.

What the pharmacist on Bacture Road, the food vendor on Atiku Way, and the students stretched across Adamawa’s campuses share is not despair. It is something harder and more specific; adaptation under conditions they did not choose. They are budgeting differently, spending more selectively, building informal credit networks, learning trades before launching businesses, and holding onto customers through quality when they can no longer compete on price.

The Central Bank is cutting rates. External reserves are at a 13-year high. Inflation is declining for the eleventh straight month. These are real gains and they deserve acknowledgment. But disinflation in Abuja does not automatically translate into restored purchasing power in Yola. The gap between policy achievement and lived reality remains wide, and the people bearing the cost of bridging it are the same people who had the least to spare when the crisis began.

The question that stays with you, long after the data is put away, is a simple one. When the country’s macroeconomic numbers finally recover, who will remember what it cost the people who carried the weight while they did?