Bank of Botswana (BoB) Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), on Thursday announced yet another increase on the interest rate in an effort to tame escalating inflation, which has shot to levels last experienced in 2008.
Botswana’s inflation rate continues to soar. Given the fears about Consumer Price Index (CPI), it’s reasonable to assume that in order to fight inflation, which has recently been at multi-decade highs in many countries, central banks will continue to implement rate hikes in the foreseeable future in order to prevent inflationary pressures from becoming entrenched – another that dilemma that consumers should brace for.
After starting off the year 2022 on a 13 year high in January and February at a record 10.6 percent, Inflation has started cooling off, registering a 0.6 percentage points drop in March, Statistic Botswana has reported.
The annual inflation rate remained unchanged in February 2022, maintaining the 13-year all-time high figure of 10.6 percent, the same rate as in January 2022, Statistics Botswana's Consumer Price Index has reported. The last time Botswana recorded such high inflation levels was during the 2008/9 financial crisis.
Botswana's inflation continued to rise in December 2021, after registering a slight increase of 0.1 percent, Statistics Botswana has reported. In its monthly release of the Consumer Price Index, the country's central data authority stated that annual inflation rate was 8.7 percent in December 2021, registering an increase of 0.1 of a percentage point from the November 2021 rate of 8.6 percent.