Expert in charge of the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), Yemi Kale, has said that his organisation has no statistical record of the seven million new jobs which some ministers in the Federal cabinet claimed were recently created.
Yemi Kale, who is the Statistician General of the Federation and Chief Executive Officer of the NBS said that the Bureau has no data to back up the claim the minister of Labour and Productivity, Chris Ngige and the minister of Agriculture, Audu Ogbeh that the government has created over seven million jobs recently.
Speaking on GatefieldTV programme #ConversationswithAbangMercy, Yemi Kale said: “We don’t have the data anyway, that data of is 6 or 7 million, we don’t have that. I can’t comment on what other data users or data producers say but I can comment on what we produce here as the official source of data.
“We have not produced any data on job creation, we produced data on people that were unemployed at the particular time and that is what we are sticking to.”
According to Kale, the NBS is not interested in politics, saying:
“We don’t do politics at the NBS, the National Bureau of Statistics is the official source of data. Our law does not allow us to be countered. The law says very clearly that NBS is the official source of Nigerian data.
“Everybody else can have their opinion, they can do their own computations if they want to but when it comes to national data, the authoritative source, the custodian of all data is the NBS.
“So, we don’t comment on what other people even ministers say as far as data is concerned. Our data is for evidence-based policy and decision making and that is what we do.” [myad]
