The National Bureau of Statistics reported headline inflation at 14.63% in September, down from 15.39% in August, a fourth consecutive decline. Core inflation eased to 12.95% from 13.29%. Month on month, headline inflation slowed sharply to 0.06% from 0.71%. Food inflation year on year edged up to 19.59% from 19.57%, while month on month food prices fell 1.55% after rising 1.02% in August. Headlines have reported this variously as food prices dropping and as food inflation rising. Both describe the same release using different measures. FAAC separately shared ₦2.428 trillion among the three tiers of government for September.

The two food figures answer two different business questions and confusing them will cost you money. The month-on-month fall of 1.55% is what your October restocking looks like against September: food inputs genuinely got cheaper over the month. The year-on-year rate of 19.59% is what your customer is comparing against the same time last year, and on that measure nothing improved at all. So your input costs eased while your customer's sense of being worse off than a year ago did not, which connects directly to the CBN survey finding reported last week that 77.2% of households now describe prices as high. The practical consequence is that a cost saving you make in October should not be assumed to come with a demand recovery. Take the margin. Do not extrapolate the volume.

Dangote raised its diesel gantry price from ₦1,700 to ₦1,800 per litre, an increase of ₦100 or 5.88%, effective Saturday 10 October. That is three days after the ₦80 cut to ₦1,700 on 7 October. The refinery's commercial operations instructed customers to return automated truck call-ups for repricing before loading could resume. Depot diesel prices across Lagos now run from roughly ₦1,800 to ₦2,000, with Matrix at the top of the range and Nipco and Rain Oil at ₦1,900. No reason for the increase was given in the notice. Petrol, by contrast, was broadly stable, with Lagos depot prices between ₦1,344 and ₦1,350 in mid-October.

Last week this brief advised contracting diesel supply against ₦1,700 and described the decline as close to fully delivered. That advice had a seventy-two hour shelf life and anyone who acted on it as a quarter-long planning assumption was wrong because we were. The correction is recorded in full below, but the structural lesson is the one worth keeping. We also observed last week that Dangote had priced down to import parity. What follows from pricing at parity is exactly this: the gantry now tracks global refined product costs in both directions, at a few days of notice, with no margin buffer to absorb a move. Any single gantry print is now a snapshot, not a level. The right response is to stop contracting on a number and start contracting on a formula, with a reference index and a stated adjustment trigger.

Gross external reserves rose to $58.81 billion on 12 October from $55.08 billion on 9 October, a gain of $3.73 billion in three days. Reserves stood at $53.90 billion on 1 September and $54.93 billion at the end of September, so the September to mid-October gain is about $4.91 billion or 9.1%. The current level approaches the roughly $58.91 billion recorded on 19 November 2008, a near eighteen-year high. Net foreign reserves, which deduct near-term liabilities such as swaps and forwards, are separately reported at $46 billion. Reporting on the jump identifies no specific cause, describing instead a steady upward trend and improved external liquidity.

A 6.8% move in three days is not an accumulation pattern, it is an event. Reserve increases of that shape usually have a mechanical cause: a Eurobond settlement, a multilateral drawdown, a swap maturity or a large single receipt. None has been published. That distinction matters more than the headline, because borrowed reserves defend the exchange rate exactly as well as earned reserves right up until they have to be repaid. The gap between the gross figure of $58.81 billion and the net figure of $46 billion is itself the reminder: roughly $12.8 billion of the gross number is already committed. None of this suggests instability, and the buffer is genuinely the strongest in nearly two decades. It does mean that an unexplained three-day jump is not a reason to change your FX planning. Plan against the net figure and the trend, not against the headline.

The All-Share Index fell 0.33% over the week to close at 247,539.73 on Friday 16 October, a third consecutive weekly decline. The NGX Banking Index fell 3.15% to 2,532.47, its fourth consecutive weekly fall and the steepest of the run. Consumer Goods fell 2.39% to 7,239.74. Industrial Goods was broadly unchanged at 10,442.95 and Insurance eased 0.14% to 1,079.57. Oil and Gas was the only sector to advance meaningfully, rising 3.13% to 6,194. The week was characterised by lower liquidity and heavy bearish volume.

Four consecutive weekly declines in bank stocks, accelerating rather than stabilising, is a market consensus rather than a wobble. Development 2 gives the mechanism directly: a bank placing ₦2.2 trillion at the central bank earns the deposit rate on it, not a lending margin, and a 45% cash reserve requirement holds a further block of its funding unproductive. Equity investors are pricing that arithmetic. The newer signal is Consumer Goods down 2.39%, which is the market reaching the same conclusion the CBN household survey reached last week about where the consumer actually is. Oil and Gas rising 3.13% against that backdrop is consistent with a market rotating toward the one sector with dollar-linked earnings. For an SME owner the read-across has now been consistent for a month: the wealth effect that supported premium and professional spending in September is not coming back this quarter.

A Notice of Extension published on 12 October and approved by the SEC moved the offer close from 13 to 27 October. The stated reasons are cross-border distribution, depositary receipt programmes and time for investors to complete account opening and identity verification. The only subscription evidence in the public domain is a verbal remark by Aliko Dangote to journalists that subscriptions were "more than three or four times" the amount intended. No interim or final figure has been released by the issuer, the issuing houses or the SEC. A separate pre-IPO private placement closed in July at about $2.5 billion with 3.7 times subscription, but that does not measure demand in the public offer. Kenya's CMA approved a GDR prospectus and Uganda's CMA approved marketing to high net worth and professional investors, while the Southern African structure still requires approvals. Collated returns are due 3 November and the basis of allotment goes to the SEC on 10 November.

Two readings of the same extension are circulating and no published data supports either. One reads it as a distribution decision, which is routine where cross-border depositary structures are still being approved. The other reads it as a book that is short, and some commentary projects a final subscription of 70% to 80%. Proshare, reviewing the evidence on record, declines to adopt either position, which is the correct posture when the issuer, the issuing houses and the regulator have all published nothing. What has changed usefully for you is time. You now have until 27 October rather than 13 October, and the filings that actually settle the question arrive on 3 and 10 November, after the close. That is an uncomfortable sequence: you are asked to commit before the evidence is filed. For most small business owners the sensible response to an instrument you cannot value on published data is to size small or to decline, and to feel no urgency about either.