We weren’t familiar with your game

Tinubu might actually achieve his 15% inflation rate goal

Mar 19, 2025

Good morning, Big Brains. Have you seen CorruptTok and what Gen Zs are doing to your president on TikTok? You should check it out to have a good laugh this morning.

- Margaret

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Let’s get into today’s edition:

Tinubu might actually achieve his 15% inflation rate goal
Nigerians can no longer afford cars

The Big Daily

Tinubu might actually achieve his 15% inflation rate goal

In December 2024, President Tinubu promised to make sure that inflation drops to 15% by the end of 2025, but we called him delulu. Well, here’s us officially eating our words and swallowing them because we weren’t familiar with his game. At the time, inflation was 34.6%. Now, it’s miraculously at 23.18% and financial experts are now predicting that there’s a high chance that inflation will continue to drop significantly in 2025.

Dr. Muda Yusuf, an economic expert who spoke to Nairametrics, gave a simple explanation about why this is most likely going to happen.

First, there’s something called the “base effect which basically means that inflation is now being measured by comparing present prices to the previous year. Since 2024 was a financial nightmare with insane prices, 2025 is expected to look better in comparison. So we’re still dealing with insane prices, but not the 2024 kind.

Yusuf also said the economy is starting to stabilize because the naira is finally fighting back.

But he also mentioned that while 23.18% inflation might seem low on paper, it is still high in reality. So if the dropping trend continues, it’s actually possible for Tinubu to achieve his 15% inflation rate. The question is this— will it have positive impacts on Nigerians?

Why is this a big deal?

To be fair, all President Tinubu said was that he'd make inflation drop to 15%. He didn’t promise that the drop would make life easier for you. And that’s the real issue.

Inflation going down sounds like a win on paper, but it doesn’t mean prices will return to what they were before. It just means prices will continue to rise but at a slower pace. That bag of rice that jumped from ₦30,000 to ₦90,000 isn’t suddenly going back to ₦30,000. At best, it might rise to ₦95,000 instead of ₦100,000.

The minimum wage is still stuck at ₦70,000, which can barely fuel a car for a month, let alone feed a family. So even with inflation dropping, the everyday reality of expensive goods and services won’t be disappearing anytime soon.

To Tinubu, this 15% inflation goal is just another KPI that can be smashed with a few adjustments on paper. At the end of the year, he will be well within his rights to say he achieved that KPI but it won’t necessarily look like it. Unless we see policies that address real Nigerian problems like minimum wage increase, food relief programs, and reduced fuel prices, this inflation drop will just be another number that looks good on news headlines.

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Nigerians can no longer afford cars

Cars are now for Nigerians who have finished eating. In 2024, the number of cars imported into the country dropped from ₦1.47 trillion in 2023 to ₦1.26 trillion. That drop is mainly due to of the crash of naira, and the rise of inflation.

By the end of 2024, the naira was ₦1,535 per dollar, almost twice its ₦997 value from 2023. That naturally made the cost of clearing an imported car at customs ridiculously expensive.

According to Kelechi Achilike, a car dealer who spoke to BusinessDay, clearing a Toyota Corolla used to cost around ₦450k or ₦480k. But in 2025, it will cost about ₦3 million.

In Achilike’s shop, a 2004 Toyota Corolla is now priced at ₦7 million or ₦8 million. Unfortunately, this is now above the pay grade of many Nigerians, and that has led to a major drop in car sales. Achilike says he used to sell almost 10 cars a week but now considers himself lucky if he’s able to sell two in a month.

But according to Seyi Tinubu, President Tinubu is still the greatest president Nigeria has ever had because why are people even driving cars? What happened to Elphaba’s flying broom?

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This Week’s Big Question

”What’s something you used to buy easily before Tinubu but now feels like a luxury?”

MmaGod’s response - “Data, hands down! We used to say, ‘Even if you're broke, just have data, and life will be fine’. This government clearly said, ‘No, you must feel it properly!”

You can also share your response here, and if it’s as interesting as MmaGod’s, we’ll feature it in the next edition.