The jollof index: A survivor’s guide to Nigeria’s beautiful wahala

Wallahi, if you want to understand Nigeria in 2026, don’t read the budget speech. Don’t listen to the economists on Arise TV with their graphs and their ceteris paribus “boko-ism”. Just ask a woman in Sokoto how much it costs to cook a pot of jollof rice for her family. She will look at you with the kind of pity reserved for people who still believe in fairy tales, and she will tell you: thirty thousand, four hundred and thirty-five naira. That is not a typo. That is the price of a pot of rice, oil, pepper, and Maggi. That is the Jollof Index, and it is screaming.

The economists will tell you this is a 19.4 per cent increase from last October. They will tell you it is because of the 2026 geopolitical energy shock, which pushed global oil prices up by 60 percent, which pushed domestic fuel prices up by 14 per cent, which pushed transport fares up, which pushed food prices up. They will use words like “transmission channels” and “welfare implications.” I will use words like wahala. The global world is fighting its wars, and somehow, the bill always arrives at the doorstep of the man selling roasted corn by the roadside at Karmo Market. Dey play.

But here is the thing about Nigeria: we are a nation of professional survivors. We have turned suffering into an art form, a comedy special, a TikTok challenge. When the fuel price hit six times what it was when this government entered, we did not riot. We simply adjusted. We stopped buying petrol for the generator and started buying solar panels. When the naira fell from N460 to N1,380 against the dollar, we did not storm Aso Rock. We simply started pricing our goods in dollars and praying in naira. Alhamdulillah for small mercies.

The Jollof Index is not the only index that is bleeding. The minimum wage is N70, 000. A minimum wage earner can only cook two pots of jollof rice before their entire monthly salary is exhausted. So, if you are a civil servant with a wife and four children, you are mathematically required to choose between feeding your family and paying rent. There is no third option. The third option is japa.

And japa we are doing. By mid-2026, 94, 000 doctors and nurses had left Nigeria since the wave began. Benue State has less than 600 doctors, meaning one doctor is attending to 10, 000 patients. Ten thousand. That is not a doctor-patient ratio; that is a queue at Obalende bus stop. The President has pledged to stem the exodus, but the doctors are not listening. They have seen the working conditions. They have seen the salaries. They have seen the fact that a nurse in Saudi Arabia earns more in a month than a consultant earns in a year. Who dey breathe? Certainly not the patients in the public hospital waiting room.

While the doctors are leaving, the children are not going to school. Nigeria has the highest number of out-of-school children in the world—18.3 million, according to UNICEF, with some estimates pushing it to nearly 20 million. Nine-and-a-half million of them are Almajiri children, representing 72 per cent of the out-of-school demographic. In Kano alone, 875,000 children are out of school due to poverty and structural barriers. These are not statistics. These are future bandits, future kidnappers, future politicians, future graduates of the University of Hard Knocks. Aura salad for the soul, indeed. Na wa o!

And speaking of bandits, they are doing better than the farmers. Between July 2024 and June 2025, 2,938 people were kidnapped in the North-West alone. Zamfara recorded 1,203 abductions, Kaduna 629. Armed groups netted nearly six million dollars in ransoms in a single year. Farmers are abandoning their farms because they cannot afford to be kidnapped while planting masara. Agricultural activity in parts of Yorubaland has dropped by 40 per cent because of banditry and herder attacks. So, the food is not just expensive because of global oil prices; it is expensive because the people who grow the food are hiding in their houses, praying that the next knock on the door is not a ransom demand.

The electricity grid is not helping. Between August 2023 and April 2026, the grid failed 22 times. Eleven collapses in the first five months of 2026 alone. The government says it has not removed electricity subsidy, but the Band A customers are paying tariffs that could fund a small private army. So, we buy generators, we buy fuel, we buy solar panels, we buy inverters, we buy peace of mind in instalments. The man who said “no gree for anybody” clearly never tried to run a small business in Nigeria with NEPA as a partner.

And through all of this, the trust has evaporated. Seventy per cent of Nigerians say most or all police officers are corrupt. Sixty-seven per cent of those who sought police help paid a bribe. Only 10 per cent believe they can report corruption without fear of retaliation. A review of 393 corruption cases involving public officials between 2013 and 2026 found that only 144 ever reached a final judgment. Six in ten sit unresolved, some for over a decade. The system is not broken; it is working exactly as designed. The design is just not for you.

So, what do we do? We laugh. We make skits. We tweet. We create TikTok challenges with the name of the latest national disaster. We say “God when” and “who go believe” and “we move” and “iya wuya”. We carry our suffering like a badge of honour, because if we do not laugh, we will cry, and crying in this economy is a luxury we cannot afford.

But beneath the laughter, there is a question that will not go away. The Jollof Index is not just a measure of food prices. It is a measure of how far we have fallen. It is a measure of a nation that has everything… oil, gas, land, sunshine, young Naija boys and gals, and yet cannot feed its children, cannot keep its doctors, cannot protect its farmers, cannot educate its future.

Ya Allah ka bamu sa’a. And may your pot of jollof never cost more than your monthly salary. Insha Allah.