By News Correspondent, Newstexts.com
For Yunus Akanji, the preparations for Eid al-Adha — the most significant sacrifice festival in the Islamic calendar — used to follow a reliable rhythm. Every year, the Islamic schoolteacher at the Nurul Bayan Islamic School in Abuja would either travel home to Saki in Oyo State to celebrate with his extended family, or stay put and buy a ram to slaughter for his students and household. Gifts would be shared. Meals would be cooked. Children would arrive dressed in new clothes.
This year, none of that is happening.
“I have concluded that we will just celebrate with whatever we have,” Akanji told journalists this week. He did not say it with resignation. He said it the way many Nigerians now speak about money — with a flatness that comes from having recalibrated expectations many times over.
Akanji’s students’ parents, who usually pay fees that help sustain his household, have largely stopped paying. “Most of them have not even paid,” he said. The school is struggling. So is the family. And so, it turns out, is almost everyone else getting ready for Sallah.
What Sallah Means — and What It Costs
Eid al-Adha, known widely across Nigeria as Sallah, is one of the two holiest festivals in the Muslim calendar. Rooted in the story of Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son, the festival is marked by communal prayers, the ritual slaughter of animals — rams being the preferred choice — and the sharing of meat with family, neighbours, and those in need. In Nigeria, where Muslims make up roughly half of the country’s estimated 220 million people, Sallah is also an occasion for travel, reunion, and festivity that ripples through the entire economy.
It is, in other words, not simply a religious observance. It is also a market event. And Nigeria’s markets are in distress.
A survey across major ram markets in Ibadan by the News Agency of Nigeria found that small-sized rams, which sold between N70,000 and N80,000 in 2025, are now priced between N200,000 and N250,000. Medium-sized rams now fetch between N300,000 and N400,000, while larger animals are priced between N500,000 and N900,000.
In Kano, the situation is no different. Surveys at Goron Dutse and Kofar Nai’s livestock markets show that animal prices have risen significantly compared to last year, forcing many prospective buyers to either postpone purchases or opt for smaller animals based on their purchasing power.
In Kebbi State, one prospective buyer, Ibrahim Sulaiman, put it plainly: “What we bought for about N250,000 last year is now close to N500,000. We are hoping prices will come down before Sallah.” They are unlikely to.
The Chain of Causes
Nigeria’s livestock market does not exist in isolation. Several converging pressures have driven the dramatic price surge in sacrificial animals this Sallah season.
First, transport costs. Sellers at Ibadan markets largely blamed the high cost of rams on petrol prices, which have driven up transport costs from northern Nigeria, where much of the country’s livestock originates.
Second, supply disruption. Niger Republic — a key supplier of rams and other livestock to Nigeria — imposed a ban on the export of cattle, sheep, goats, and camels ahead of its own Eid preparations, warning that security agencies had been instructed to enforce it strictly. The ban has forced Nigerian livestock traders to source animals from Cameroon and Chad, adding costs and uncertainty across the supply chain.
Third, and most fundamentally, the naira. Fuel prices surged from N185 per litre in 2023 to N1,025 per litre in 2024, while the currency exchange rate weakened from 460 naira to 1,700 naira per US dollar. Every link in the food and livestock supply chain — from animal feed to transportation to market fees — has felt that collapse in purchasing power.
How It Started: The Tinubu Reforms
To understand why this Sallah feels so different, you have to go back to 29 May 2023 — the day Bola Tinubu was inaugurated as Nigeria’s president and, in the same breath, announced the end of the country’s decades-long petrol subsidy.
Tinubu’s administration removed fuel subsidies, unified foreign exchange rates, and undertook substantial debt restructuring — steps presented as necessary to address longstanding structural weaknesses and market distortions that previous administrations had deferred. The subsidy alone, defenders of the reform noted, had cost the government roughly $10 billion in 2022.
The short-term consequences were immediate and severe. Headline inflation accelerated from 18% in mid-2023 to over 24% by July, reaching an 18-year high. Food inflation alone climbed from 24.8% to 27.0% within weeks of the policy change.
Nearly three years on, Nigeria’s headline inflation for March 2026 increased to 15.38% on a year-on-year basis, up from 15.06% in February 2026. While the figure has eased from its 2024 peaks, it reflects a methodological change in how the statistics bureau measures prices rather than genuine relief for households. The total cost of the same set of grocery items purchased in 2020 and in 2026 has reportedly risen from N25,225 to N147,050 — a 582% increase.
Speaking at the Africa CEO Forum in Kigali last week, President Tinubu defended the reforms, comparing the economic hardship to the pain of childbirth. “It is difficult, it is painful,” he said. “But it is just like the human reproduction process. A woman carries a pregnancy, goes through labour pain, and smiles when she sees a child.” His critics would note that for many Nigerian families, the child has yet to arrive.
The Human Arithmetic
The pressure shows up not in policy documents but in the small daily calculations that Nigerians now make before every purchase, every journey, every celebration.
Nafisa Ibrahim, a graduate from Ogun State completing her mandatory National Youth Service Corps programme in Abuja, has dropped her plan to go home for Eid. Transport costs made it impossible. She said the return fare has risen to about N35,000 — roughly $26 — compared to the N15,000 she paid when she travelled to Abuja in February.
In Lagos markets, the collapse in buying power is visible in the price of basic ingredients. A small bag of pepper, once sold for N18,000, now costs about N36,000. A large bag of onions has risen from N60,000 to N105,000. A basket of tomatoes that previously cost N32,000 now fetches as much as N67,000.
One shopper, Olufade Sunday, described how even a N10,000 budget proved insufficient on a recent market visit. “Before, what I bought for N1,000 is no longer possible even with N1,500,” he said.
For those who do intend to sacrifice a ram this Sallah, the calculation has become a communal one. “The prices are beyond what ordinary workers can easily afford. Some people may have to contribute money together to buy one ram for Sallah,” said one buyer in Kebbi State. The ritual remains. The means of performing it have shifted.
Sallah Has Always Been Resilient
It is worth noting that this is not the first time economic hardship has tested Sallah. Nigeria has weathered fuel shortages, currency crises, and recessions before, and the festival has endured through all of them. The sharing that is central to Eid — the distribution of meat to neighbours and those in need — tends to become more, not less, meaningful in lean years. Communities pool resources. Families renegotiate expectations. The occasion adapts.
But there is a difference between adaptation and erosion. When teachers cannot afford to travel home, when young graduates cannot pay the bus fare to see their families, when a medium-sized ram costs what was once a month’s salary for many civil servants, the festival is not merely being adapted. It is being repriced out of reach for a widening segment of the population.
For many Nigerian households, rice has become something eaten only on festive occasions because of its high cost. The grim irony is that for many more this year, even the festive occasion may not be enough to bring it to the table.
Newstexts.com | News Desk
