Dr Yemi Kale, Nigeria’s Statistician General and CEO of the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has explained why the bureau has yet to release Q4 2017 employment data. He stated yesterday that the data is not ready for release in the meantime because the bureau does not have money for the research.
He also refuted the Twitter follower’s claim that the data had been pulled off the calendar due to political reasons.
Lol u guys & politics. 1stly Nbs is not & will never be subjected 2 politics at least while I’m in charge. Hav said this many times. 2ndly & 3rdly, employment data was not taken off d calender but simply pushed forward bcoz the funds to do it isnt available. No signed budget.
— Dr Yemi Kale (@sgyemikale) June 5, 2018
According to him, it takes at least two months to conduct research and publish such data. Bearing this in mind, he and his team worked with the assumption that the national budget would be passed by June, which would then make it possible for them to release the data latest September.
It takes two months from start to publication so I assumed budget will be passed and funds released by late June/early July hence sept release
— Dr Yemi Kale (@sgyemikale) June 5, 2018
On whether lack of research funds will also affect the timely release of other microeconomic data, Kale clarified that some data do not require as much money to produce.
Some data don’t require more money to compile so can be funded by staff in advance of releases. Some like employment are huge/command bigger financial commitments which we cannot expect staff 2 fund in advance. So any data u see before budget release is relatively inexpensive
— Dr Yemi Kale (@sgyemikale) June 5, 2018
In a buildup to what apparently turned out to be a Twitter Q&A, Kale had tweeted that NBS is the custodian of all of Nigeria’s data; an authoritative source for data and stats and coordinator of all national database.
Nbs is the custodian of All NIGERIA data, authoritarive source and stats coordinator and houses NIGERIAs national database. We have to produce and keep all national data and have control over all but population. This is Nigerians official data and according must be housed by nbs
— Dr Yemi Kale (@sgyemikale) June 5, 2018
