Cost Of Living Crisis In Nigeria: Families Skip Meals As Food Prices Soar

The rising cost of food, due to inflation, has continued to take its toll on Nigerians, forcing families to adjust to the current realities, findings by Daily Trust Saturday revealed.

This is even as analysts have warned that the worst is yet to come given the recent flooding experienced in most parts of the country.

They said more impact of the situation might be felt within the next six months.

Daily Trust findings showed that while most families have resorted to rationing as a way of contending with the situation, others have been forced to reduce meals for their children.

At Ikate in Surulere, a suburb of Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, Doris Nwachukwu, a foodstuff seller, said she watched her customers grapple with escalating prices over the past months.

“Rice, garri, onions, noodles, everything has risen in price. Some have more than doubled, others have jumped by various percentages,” she said.

For a Lagos-based Bisi Alo, feeding in her house has been altered fundamentally from the number of times the children eat in a day to the composition of the meals they are served.

“I have had to cut down feeding for everybody in my house. It was three times a day; now it is twice. You take (food) in the morning because breakfast is very important.  You have had a long time in the night so you take breakfast.

“When the children return from school in the afternoon, they have to wait till late in the evening before they take another meal that can take them through the night,” she said.

Alo is a fulltime missionary, and some of the children in her house are those she adopted to take care of.

“It is only my husband that is working. I am a missionary; I do not earn salaries. I would not kill the man, so we have had to cut down.

“For the children that are attending school, I had to knock off things like Golden Morn because they were becoming very expensive,” the woman who caters for about eight children explained.

She continued, “A carton of Golden Morn previously sold for N4,500, but it has increased to N10,000. And the children need to go to school. However, there are times they will take it just once in a day at the weekends, then in the evening, we drink garri. It is not easy.

“On our timetable we have tea on Tuesdays. We used to pay N700 for 10 sachets of Ovaltine in a roll, but now, it is N1,100. So now, two children share one sachet of Ovaltine. Previously, one person had a sachet.

“I have to look for N100/loaf of bread, which is really nothing because by the time they eat it, it will not get anywhere, but I have to close my eyes and they manage it with tea. So, I am trying to look into things I can bake by myself. If I could get the ingredients I would try and bake bread at home.”

-Dailytrust