Minister of the Federal Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning, Atiku Bagudu, has bemoaned the paucity of data in Nigeria and urged Statisticians to use their data to tell Nigeria’s stories.
Bagudu, who spoke on Monday at the 2024 African Statistics Day celebration in Abuja, with the theme, “Supporting Education by modernizing production of fit-for-purpose statistics,” frowned at the country’s continued reliance on other nations for its data, and urged Nigerians to free themselves from data imperialism.
The Minister said some countries have unmerited advantages in terms of data generation and presentation, urging Nigeria and Africa to appreciate that some firms and countries skew data generation and presentation.
“Today, the market power of Amazon or Google determines what I buy. When COVID unfortunately struck the world, we saw data companies that were showing data about the movement of people. And it just shows that in a way, sorry to use this word, maybe data imperialism is still very active in the sense that some companies or some countries have an undue advantage when it comes to data generation and the way that data is presented.
“So I understand that we also need to recognise this and to compensate for it so that we are also using data in a way that we are telling our story.
“And one of those stories that I would like to end with because it’s important to my portfolio is for example, there is an objective way of determining how much investment a country of 230 million requires to have a good life for everyone? I believe there is. We can’t find it,” the Minister stated.
Bagudu noted that all the data generated by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) are independent of government influence and are as such reliable enough to avoid miscommunication.
According to him, “The sanctity of data is the watchword in Nigeria under President Bola Ahmed. We have recognized it as a government and given independence to the National Bureau of Statistics.
“We have never sought to interfere in any way, shape, or form with the coordination, timing, and even where some of us from an intellectual perspective want to engage in methodology debate, we make sure that we say it openly and transparently so that there will be no miscommunication as to what we are doing.”
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Education Manager, Mr. Jutaro Sakamioto said in his goodwill message that education is proven as one of the most important investments.
He said it does not only empowers children and youth with the knowledge and skills they need to thrive in labour market and society but also drives economic and social development in the country.
According to him, a country with educated and productive citizens enjoys spillover effects such as increased tax revenue, decreased crime rate, and improved democracy with active citizenship.
“This is the reason why so many countries in the world put education as the top national priority. The potential of education investment is particularly high in Nigeria where the child population is increasing at a rapid pace,” he stated.
He noted that Nigeria is grappling with education challenges owing to its huge number of out-of-school children and poor learning results, and pledged that UNICEF with other development partners will continue to support the Government in transforming the data governance and ecosystems in the education sector.
The Statistician-General of the Federation, Adeyemi Adeniran said data shows that entities that innovate, on average, experience a 30 percent growth in value than those that do not and outperform them by 11 percent in terms of total revenue, annually.
He said NBS has adopted the mantra of innovation to stay relevant in meeting the demands of its mandate, and added, “Accordingly, we have set up a Data Innovation Desk within the Bureau to advance, monitor, and track all data innovation initiatives across our production and dissemination processes. This can be seen in all aspects of our work, be it in the data we produce and the methodology we adopt, in the way we plan for our surveys, the way we collect and process the data, the way we report and disseminate information, and most of all, in the way in which we communicate the data to the public.
“All of this is in a bid to ensure that we provide the right data which is a critical tool for development to all our users in a timely manner and in a way that is useful and suited to their needs.”
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