What H1 2026 corporate results actually look like against food prices, fuel costs, electricity tariffs and wages — company by company, number by number.
NEWS ANALYSIS
TheDigger Intelligence Unit
Ten of Nigeria’s largest listed companies posted 36 percent revenue growth and 67 percent profit growth in H1 2026 — a performance the presidency credits to its reform agenda. Yet, millions of Nigerian households continue to struggle with the cost of food, fuel, power, and stagnant wages.
This second piece in the series tests that tension directly, mapping specific corporate results against the household indicators the presidency’s statement never engaged.
The findings complicate the story in both directions. Some of what follows confirms the widening gap the first piece identified. Some of it doesn’t — and that nuance matters more than a clean, one-sided verdict would.
Food: A More Complicated Picture Than “Corporate Profiteering”
National food inflation stood at 17.52 percent year-on-year in June 2026, down from 25.41 percent a year earlier, though it accelerated on a month-on-month basis, rising to 3.75 percent in June from 2.98 percent in May, driven by higher prices for staples including tomatoes, pepper, garri, yam and beef.
Against that backdrop, the two food and beverage giants named in the presidency’s own framing produced genuinely different results.
BUA Foods posted a profit after tax of N292.27 billion for H1 2026, a 12 percent increase, but its revenue actually fell 16.2 per cent, to N765.12 billion from N912.51 billion. The company said the decline reflected moderated pricing across key product categories amid inflationary pressures — in other words, BUA Foods says it held prices down even as costs rose, and the profit gain came instead from cost discipline: gross margin expanded sharply, to 47.5 per cent from 37.2 per cent a year earlier, driven by lower production and operating costs rather than higher prices charged to consumers.
That is a genuinely inconvenient data point for a simple “corporations are profiteering off hungry households” narrative. If BUA Foods’ own account is accurate, the company’s profit growth this half came from internal efficiency, not from passing food inflation on to consumers at a faster rate than costs rose.
Nestlé Nigeria tells a different story. Revenue rose 12 percent to N650.76 billion, and profit after tax jumped 28 percent to N64.78 billion, with profit before tax up 43 percent to N126.77 billion. But a significant share of that profit growth did not come from selling more Milo or Maggi — it came from finance income, which surged to N33.26 billion from just N1.12 billion a year earlier, largely foreign exchange gains tied to the naira’s appreciation discussed in Part 1 of this series.
Strip that out, and Nestlé’s underlying operating performance, while still solid, is considerably less dramatic than the 28 per cent headline profit figure suggests.
The honest read: neither company’s H1 2026 results support a simple story of “companies are getting richer by making food more expensive.” One held prices down and cut costs; the other’s profit surge was substantially a currency and finance effect, not a pricing story. Food inflation remains a serious burden on households — but this half’s blue-chip results don’t show corporate food margins as the primary driver of it.
Fuel And Transport: Where The Gap Is Real, And Stark
If food complicates the presidency’s critics, fuel does not. This is the sharpest, most direct contradiction in the entire dataset.
The average pump price of petrol rose from about N1,035 per litre in January 2026 to as high as N1,596 per litre in May, an increase of more than 54 per cent in five months, before easing to around N1,300 by June, according to industry data from the Major Energies Marketers Association of Nigeria (MEMAN). Diesel moved even more violently, rising 86.4 per cent year-on-year to N3,277.47 per litre in May 2026. The price swings were severe enough that Nigerians cut their average daily petrol consumption by 22.3 percent over the same period, according to MEMAN — a direct, measurable sign of households and businesses pulling back under cost pressure.
At the same time, Dangote Petroleum Refinery‘s share of Nigeria’s PMS supply climbed from 38.9 per cent in 2025 to 81.7 per cent by the end of H1 2026, with domestic refineries supplying roughly 79 per cent of all PMS available in the market during the period. That expansion in domestic refining capacity is precisely the kind of structural change the presidency’s statement credits as a reform win — and it likely helped prevent an even sharper supply crisis, per MEMAN’s own account. But rising domestic supply share did not, on this data, translate into falling prices for consumers during the same window; pump prices and Dangote’s market share climbed together for most of H1 2026, only diverging in June.
This is the clearest instance in the entire audit of a policy success story (expanded local refining capacity) coexisting with a genuine household cost crisis (a near-doubling of pump prices at the peak) within the same six months.
Electricity: Paying More For Service That Hasn’t Improved
The clearest structural contradiction in the audit is electricity. Band A consumers, roughly 15 per cent of Nigeria’s electricity customers but responsible for about 40 percent of total consumption, saw their tariff rise from N68 to N225 per kilowatt-hour, an increase of 231 per cent, following NERC‘s 2024 order, with a further proposed hike for other bands under review in 2025 and continued disputes into 2026 over whether additional increases are planned.
The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission’s own figures show Nigerians have paid an additional N1 trillion in electricity tariffs annually since the cost-reflective tariff order took effect, with roughly N2 trillion in additional revenue flowing to distribution companies over two years. Yet average electricity generation has remained roughly flat at around 4,200 megawatts, while the country’s distribution companies and state utilities have only been able to distribute about 3,618 megawatts of that — meaning consumers are paying substantially more for a supply that has not meaningfully grown. As Guardian Nigeria’s power sector reporting put it plainly, the country’s Band A tariff increase was “defied” by a power crisis that has left “consumers pay more for less.”
This is the one place in the audit where the presidency’s own framing offers no cover at all: tariff revenue has scaled dramatically, but the underlying service it is meant to fund has not.
Wages: The Number That Hasn’t Moved
Nigeria’s national minimum wage has stood at N70,000 a month, roughly $42, since President Tinubu signed the National Minimum Wage (Amendment) Act into law in July 2024. It remains unchanged in 2026. Implementation itself is uneven: while Lagos pays N85,000 and Imo pays N104,000, labour groups say states including Kaduna, Gombe, Borno, Yobe, Zamfara, Ebonyi, Cross River and the FCT have serious implementation gaps, and employers with fewer than 25 staff are legally exempt from the wage floor entirely, leaving many informal-sector workers on N30,000 or less.
Nigeria’s headline inflation has moderated from a peak above 34 percent in 2024 to 15.91 percent by June 2026, but cumulative price growth across the period since the wage was set has still substantially outpaced the wage itself, which has not risen at all in nominal terms. The Nigeria Labour Congress has called the N70,000 floor already unsustainable, with Joe Ajaero stating plainly that workers’ income must guarantee life, not mere survival, and the union is pushing for an early renegotiation, arguing that waiting for the statutory 2027 review cycle is untenable given the pace of price increases since 2024.
None of the ten blue-chip firms in the presidency’s statement discloses granular, comparable wage data in a form this audit could independently verify against inflation. That is itself a finding: the presidency’s own case for reform-driven prosperity rests on corporate profit and revenue figures that are fully disclosed and audited, while the wage side of the household equation, the piece of data that would show whether any of that profit reached workers, remains almost entirely opaque at the company level, leaving only the national minimum wage figure, frozen since 2024, as a proxy.
What The Audit Shows, Honestly
Laid side by side, the picture is not uniform, and it should not be presented as one.
Where the presidency’s framing holds up better than the initial critique suggested: BUA Foods‘ food pricing behaviour, and the real expansion of domestic refining capacity through Dangote, both point to specific reform-linked developments that plausibly benefited, or at least did not directly harm, ordinary consumers during H1 2026.
Where the presidency’s framing collapses entirely: electricity tariffs rose 231 percent for Band A consumers while generation capacity stayed flat, a direct transfer from household budgets to distribution company revenue with no corresponding improvement in service. Fuel prices nearly doubled at their peak even as domestic refining expanded. And the national minimum wage has not moved in two years against inflation that, even after moderating, has still eroded its real value substantially.
The honest conclusion of this audit is not that corporate Nigeria is uniformly profiting at households’ expense, nor that the presidency’s reform narrative is empty.
It is that the relationship between corporate performance and household welfare in H1 2026 varies sharply by sector, and that any single national narrative, whether “the economy is working” or “profit over people”, flattens a picture that is genuinely more mixed, and in the case of electricity tariffs, considerably worse for ordinary Nigerians than either narrative on its own would suggest.
Sources: H1 2026 unaudited results from BUA Foods Plc and Nestlé Nigeria Plc; National Bureau of Statistics CPI and fuel price reports; Major Energies Marketers Association of Nigeria downstream report; Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission tariff orders and performance factsheets.
