Headline inflation cooled in Kinshasa, but the foods the poorest buy kept climbing week by week.

By Kanisa Magazine · February 2021

Kinshasa’s consumer prices were rising at an annualised pace of 5.8 per cent in the third week of February 2021, a calm figure for a country that ended 2020 with prices running about 20 per cent above a year earlier. Inside the basket the picture is less restful: the group covering potatoes, cassava, other tubers and bananas rose 0.62 per cent in a single week.

The BCC weekly statistical digest of 24 February carries the full Kinshasa index. Its general level stood at 150.295 (December 2018 equals 100), up 0.08 per cent on the week and 0.76 per cent since the last week of December. The average hides a split between the goods that cross the franc and the goods that cross bad roads.

Two readings of the same index

Headline inflation is falling because 2020’s spike is leaving the comparison, not because staples have stopped rising.

The BCC’s summary table puts year-on-year inflation at 20.2 per cent in the third week of February. That figure still contains the shock of 2020, when the franc moved from 1,672.80 per dollar at the end of 2019 to 1,971.80 at the end of the year. Once those spring and summer months drop out of the base, the annual number will fall mechanically. The annualised rate built from 2021 weeks alone, 5.8 per cent, is the cleaner guide to current pressure.

The franc itself was not the culprit in February. The official indicative rate sat close to 1,980 for the month, a move of about 0.4 per cent from the end of 2020. A stable currency and a rising cassava price point to a different cause.

Where the pressure was

Tubers gained 1.6 per cent in three weeks, ahead of medicines, transport and restaurant meals.

The tuber and banana group climbed from 176.081 in the last week of January to 178.827 in the week to 21 February. Vegetables rose 0.12 per cent in the latest week and sugar 0.17 per cent. Health costs advanced 0.18 per cent, restaurants 0.14 per cent and transport 0.11 per cent. Bread and cereals barely moved at 0.03 per cent, and edible oils did not move at all.

So the squeeze sits in locally grown staples and in services that depend on fuel, vehicles and imported inputs. Wheat flour and oils, priced off dollar imports and a steady franc, behaved. Cassava, which Kinshasa buys from provinces hundreds of kilometres away, did not.

The road toll on the plate

In Matadi a sack of cassava chips doubled in two months because feeder roads have failed.

Radio Okapi reported on 29 January that a full sack of cassava chips in Matadi had gone from 50,000 to 100,000 Congolese francs in two months, and the small measuring bowl from 800 to 1,300 francs. Traders blamed badly degraded farm-to-market and provincial roads, which turn a delivery from Luozi or Mbanza Mateke into an ordeal.

That is the mechanism. A trader pays for slow trucks, breakdowns, informal tolls and idle days, then prices the whole risk into the sack. The cost passes through every handler between the field and the Kinshasa market stall, and no monetary policy touches it. The BCC’s 18.5 per cent policy rate, which kept real interest rates positive in February, addresses currency and demand. It does nothing for a washed-out bridge.

What a food business does with this

Treat tuber and transport lines as the early warning, and price staples by the kilo.

The cleanest reading for 2021 is that household pressure comes from logistics before it comes from money. For a retailer or wholesaler, the weekly Kinshasa index is a free forecast: when the tuber group outruns the general level for several weeks, shelf prices in the cheapest segment are about to follow.

The decisive step is to lock supply before the next rise. Food distributors should contract cassava and plantain volumes directly with producer cooperatives, share the cost of truck repairs on the feeder roads they use, and quote customers per kilo so a rising sack price does not arrive as a surprise.