SLPP’S INFLATION FALLACIES
By Ibrahim Alusine Kamara (Kamalo)
Statistics Sierra Leone (SSL) has announced that the country’s inflation rate has returned to single digits of 9.38% in April 2025, despite in its previous monthly reports, it informed the nation that in February, the inflation rate hit 13.09%, and dropped to 10.71% in March.
“Sierra Leone’s annual national inflation rate (year-on-year) for April 2025 has declined to 9.38%, marking the first time inflation has dropped to single digits in nearly four years. This represents a 1.33 percentage point decrease from 10.71% in March 2025. Details in the attached one-pager,” SSL officially maintained.
This latest announcement has been much trumpeted about by authorities, and showcased as a remarkable economic achievement by the government.
However, majority of Sierra Leoneans are raising eyebrows at such a sudden fall of the inflation rate to single digits just over a month’s time. The prices of commodities also keep skyrocketing daily, causing appalling and unbearable cost of living in the country, yet the inflation rate has purportedly fallen.
For many Sierra Leoneans, Stats-SL’s new report should be flagged as lacking credibility – a fabrication – to hoodwink the masses and international financial bodies into believing that an ailing economy is recuperating to global expectation. More suspicious is when the report does not align with the inflation projections of the IMF and the African Development Bank.
The traders are grumbling, the buyers are moaning, the breadwinners are complaining as well, all about the reality of the local market – a place not deceptive, but has always been there to tell the state of country’s inflation!
As it truly stands, an unfettered inflationary trend continues to overwhelm the local market. The purchasing power of breadwinners is being ravaged, while the local currency – Leone – continues to depreciate. Increased NRA taxes on goods and services, including costly electricity tariffs and transportation, low agricultural output, lack of viable manufacturing industries, and the over-reliance on imported goods, among other vital things, remain the hallmarks that could not justify any drop in a country’s inflation rate.
Transparency is paramount in dealing with national data, and Statistics Sierra Leone needs to publish a detailed information of the methodology it used to arrive at its claimed single digit inflation rate, or else it would appear that its new report may have been designed to please the IMF in the guise of meeting its benchmarks and secure funding just after that financial institution has temporarily suspended funding assistance to Sierra Leone.
In some local economists’ view, what Stats-SL puts out there as a new report on the country’s inflation rate is strategically manufactured as political propaganda – a partisan inclination – to cover up the deficiencies and failings of the dispensation that be – not any true developmental feat.