On producing credible data
The establishment of an Inter-Ministerial Committee on harmonization of data collection and evaluation for Nigeria last week was a welcome development. Minister of Finance Mrs Kemi Adeosun, who announced the decision, said Statistician-General of the Federation and Director-General of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) Yemi Kale would chair the committee. Since 2011 when Yemi […]
The establishment of an Inter-Ministerial Committee on harmonization of data collection and evaluation for Nigeria last week was a welcome development. Minister of Finance Mrs Kemi Adeosun, who announced the decision, said Statistician-General of the Federation and Director-General of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) Yemi Kale would chair the committee. Since 2011 when Yemi Kale was appointed to head NBS, the agency has tried to live up to expectation as it released vital statistical data on various aspects of the economy on a regular basis. In this age of knowledge, data is no longer restricted to science laboratories. Data has become relevant in decision-making in both public and private institutions as assumptions and acting on the spur of the moment lead to errors and disasters.
Over the years, Nigeria has grappled with lack of reliable data in terms of the country’s population; records of births and deaths; population of cities and states; employment and unemployment figures; citizens and foreigners; number of pupils and students in educational institutions; the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP); the functional and moribund companies; agricultural productivity; housing needs; water needs; age of various infrastructure etc. It took the will power of Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who was the Minister of Finance under erstwhile President Goodluck Jonathan, for Nigerians to realise that the country’s economy was more robust than previously assumed. Though the outcome did not dramatically translate into any economic benefit to the ordinary Nigerian, the effort she made proved that Nigeria was worth N80.2 trillion or $509.9 billion, rising from its original figure of N42.4 trillion or $269.5 billion, almost double the size of the assumed worth.
As a result of the dearth of indigenous data about Nigeria, the country has relied on United Nations institutions for the provision of basic data for national planning, not minding the data collection methods, the evaluation processes, their integrity and biases. Where the country had generated data locally, some were not very reliable. As the minister admitted in her statement, “The establishment of the Inter-Ministerial Committee has become imperative to develop the production of national statistics and avoid data production duplication.” Of course, there are many instances of duplication of efforts in data production, but the dearth of data seems to be more pronounced than the duplication she talked about.
In order to ensure that the committee performs its duty without giving Nigerians excuses, several factors need to be taken into consideration and properly dealt with. Over the years, the capacity of staff that carry out research has been in doubt. Data gathering requires interest and skills, which some civil servants thrown into research departments of government Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) lack. Research departments are considered to be the Siberia of many government departments. It is the section where non-conformists in such offices are dumped, not because they have the training and experience to function as researchers. Also, it is the poorly funded section in MDAs, such that if government fails to release essential capital votes, all research and development projects are abandoned in the volumes of budgetary proposals.
The Minister should ensure that the civil servants that would carry out the researches are properly trained and well-motivated to enable them engage in the intellectually demanding assignment. They should be exposed to modern data collection, collation and evaluation methods, especially in this digital age. They must take advantage of modern innovations in data gathering. For instance, high-resolution satellite imagery, mobile devices, biometric data and crowd-sourced citizen reporting will help official data collection processes.Unless this is done, the agencies could produce contradictory and unreliable data that, if used for decision making, would lead to erroneous outcomes.
We call on the minister to ensure that this decision is implemented in such a way that the committee’s work would outlive the current administration, and not become one of the abandoned projects of the Buhari era.