Nigeria's headline inflation rate fell last month. The number that decides what a family actually eats went the other way.

Nigeria's annual inflation rate eased to 15.91 percent in June, down slightly from 15.93 percent in May. That's the first decline since February, and on paper it's good news. It'll show up in a press release somewhere with a chart pointing down.

Here's the number that won't get its own press release. Food inflation quickened to 17.52 percent in June, up from 16.96 percent in May. That's the fifth straight month it's climbed. Food is more than half of what an average Nigerian household spends money on. That means the number deciding whether a family eats the same way this month as last month is moving the opposite way from the headline figure everyone will be quoting.

Poor transport networks, insecurity in farming regions, bad weather and high logistics costs are the reasons economists give. Food prices refuse to come down even as the broader number cools. None of those reasons are new. None of them are close to being fixed.

The Central Bank's Monetary Policy Committee meets today and tomorrow to decide what happens to the benchmark interest rate, which has sat at 26.50 percent since its last hike. A small drop in headline inflation, alongside food prices still climbing, makes an immediate rate cut unlikely. The committee will probably hold. That's a technical decision made in a boardroom in Abuja, and it will land on every Nigerian household within days, whether or not anyone explains to them why it happened.

This is the gap the cabal story and the reform story both try to paper over. The reforms are producing a real number. It's just not the number the person doing the weekly shopping actually lives inside. She's not tracking the headline rate. She's tracking whether this month's money covers what it covered last month, and right now, for food specifically, it doesn't.

Look inside the food number and it gets more specific. Housing and utilities costs also rose faster in June, climbing to 11.19 percent from 9.79 percent in May. That means the same household absorbing higher food bills is also absorbing a higher rent or power bill in the same month. There's one piece of relief in the report. Transportation costs actually slowed, down to 15.62 percent from 17.09 percent, easing some of the pressure that came out of the fuel price shocks earlier this year.

External reserves have also grown, reaching $51.89 billion as of mid July according to the CBN's own figures. That's the number the government will lean on this week to argue the reforms are holding. Reserves and food inflation are both real, and they're both true at the same time. One measures how much foreign currency the country is holding onto. The other measures whether a household in Alimosho or Kubwa can still afford garri, beef and pepper at the price they paid last month. A rising reserve number has never once, on its own, brought a food price back down.