No insult intended in pointing out the fact that there is widespread numerical illiteracy that can be cured through education, not only among Nigerians but worldwide. Moses, do not take it personally since you attributed the fallacious statement to the 'Poor Numbers' author. With over two-thirds of our high school students failing mathematics in the WASSC exam, you should join me in advocating that every college student should be required to sit and pass statistics before graduating, no matter their discipline. Then we may discuss things like the GDP with a little more awareness of what the figures mean as sista Ngoo implied by detailing her quantitative methodology.

The only insult that I see in this thread is in Jibo's careless title - 'Voodoo'. Given the freedom of religion principle in the constitution, I think that we should not insult the religious faith of millions of people of African descent at home and in the Diaspora simply because there is a white supremacist hierarchy of respectability in matters of faith. Soyinka warned against such imperialist disrespecting of African religions by proselytizing conquerors in his 2012 book, Of Africa. We should all be more tolerant of other people's faiths especially if we do not share them, otherwise, we will be stoking the fires of religious wars that were unknown in traditional African spiritualty symbolized by the inclusive Mbari of Achebe or the interconnected Ubuntu of Tutu. CLR James respectfully observed that Voodoo was the medium of the conspiracy in The Black Jacobins.

Biko

On Thursday, 10 April 2014, 13:13, "Anunoby, Ogugua"<AnunobyO@lincolnu.edu> wrote:

There is talking “ Nigeria down” and there is speaking facts. Cynicism does just not just happen in national affairs and politics. Cynicism follows experience. Many Nigerians are cynical and actually distrusting of government generated information about their country for good reason. Their experience justifies their position. If the point being made is that Nigerians should be more trusting of their government, they should be told what has changed such that they should be.

The revision of Economic statistics including GDP data happens all the time even without rebasing. GDP data is usually based on available period economic data pivoted on a base year. As new or revised data becomes available GDP data may be revised- updated. The furor that has followed Nigeria’s rebasing of economic data reporting is a reflection in my opinion, of the growing sense of disappointment and frustration that many Nigerians feel with poor housekeeping by Nigeria’s public economic data managers. As late as this rebasing has been, it is well that it has been done rather than it was not.

The more important concern for me is not the correction that has happened but whether or not the data from now on, will be reliable as bases for economic and social planning and development. Does everyone know for example that GDP figures are macro-data whose integrity depends critically on the accuracy and timeliness of micro-data? What will be done for example to ensure the accuracy and timeliness of the keeping and reporting of micro-data? What effort will be made for example to restructure systems and processes so as to reduce the significance of the informal economy? There are many issues to identify and resolve before government economic data can be trusted by a majority of Nigerians. There are many more issues to identify and resolve before this data will be adequate- base enough to inform serious economic and social development planning and implementation.

There is the expectation that economic growth should drive general welfare improvement for citizens. A positive correlation makes sense. This expectation is however not always realized for reasons that are not too far to seek and find. They include aspirational, structural and functional rigidities and other weaknesses in the economy. What for example are the goals/objectives of public economic policies? How well thought-through are they? Are they feasible? How many Nigerians in and outside government truly believe that public economic policies are designed, adopted, and implemented to result in improvements in the lives of a majority of Nigerian citizens? Is there the will to do so? If there is how resolute is it?  

GDP growth on paper means that a country is producing more and that productivity may in fact be improving- value is being added and new value is being created at an increasing rate. Corruption creates inefficiencies and leakages which disrupt, obstruct, and ultimately prevent the transmission/sharing of much of this value to/with the largest number of citizens. Much of this value might in fact be going overseas. An inefficient and weak rule of law is another factor. There are others.

It might be added that rebasing if it is done well and there is faithfulness to it is a good thing. It is at best a means to an end and not an end in itself. Data is data. The less accurate and timely data is the less useful it is likely to be. Anyone who believes or expects that rebasing alone will spawn faster economic development including attract more foreign investment is on a fool’s ride. Foreign investors tend to be hard-nosed, purpose, fact, and result driven money people. Almost always, it is a choice and not an obligation for them  to invest in other than their home country.

Economies produce because they are designed and managed to produce. Economic productivity improves because economic activities that worked well in the past are working better. Like all desirable and progressive outcomes, economic success for a country does not happen as a result of inevitability. Necessary hard work has to be done.  

 

oa

 

 

From:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Okwy Okeke
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2014 9:23 AM
To:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Voodoo statistics

 

Oga Moses,

In my cycle, Chuba Okadigbo popularized that age old saying that statistics is like a lady's bikini; exposing many interesting bits and yet covering even more interesting,… you get it.

 

One of my wishes in that we would drop chronic cynicism for optimism in my lifetime in  Nigeria. How is it that many are happy to rehash the government figures that poverty has grown in Nigeria while refusing to accept its rebasing of the economy?

 

Anyway, the bit that interests me in your reply is that while many point out that poverty has grown in Nigeria, they fail to observe that many people have actually been lifted out of it over the years, just that it has not happened fast enough, and here is the more interesting bit - that the definition of poverty has continued to change in the last 50 years.

 

GDP is an imperfect measure no doubt, then it is so popular the world over because of its simplicity, people can intuitively understand the concept,... except Nigeria's opinion-writing class, and maybe prayer warriors.

 

It is ok to question the value of a country's GDP in the face of harsh existence, and that would not even be new. The King of Bhutan proposed measuring gross national happiness instead of GDP over 40 years ago, and many more similar proposals have surfaced from credible sources including The Economist, sadly non from Nigeria's brilliant economists who would only challenge than build (what was it again that General Ike said about those in the ring)?

 

We can't afford to talk Nigeria down , holding elected and appointed officials accountable is not same as savagely attacking the system.

 

 

Cheers,…Okwy

 

------------------------------------------
We face forward,...we face neither East or West: we face forward.......Kwame Nkrumah

 

---

From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, 10 April 2014, 14:29
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Voodoo statistics

 

Here's a nuanced article that puts rebasing and its implications in perspective. There's enough in this piece for both sides of this debate. And it is written by someone with expertise, an economic historian who recently published a book on Africa's problem of "Poor Numbers" (title of the book). There is obviously nothing wrong with rebasing, since it merely updates data on the size of the economy. However, in the case of Nigeria, the traditional positive correlation between growth (economic expansion) and poverty rates hasn't happened. Instead, the correlation, as Jerven observes, is negative. This raises questions, but the answers could actually be quite simple--that growth in the informal sector is not big enough to bring down poverty; that inflation and poor infrastructure erodes the disposable income and purchasing power of people in the informal sectors and in the lower and lower middle classes; and that much of the expansion in the formal sector has resulted in mostly upward distribution of income.

 

 

 

 

What does Nigeria’s new GDP number actually mean? – By Morten Jerven

Posted on April 8, 2014 by AfricanArgumentsEditor

So it’s official. The long overdue and widely anticipated GDP revision in Nigeria has arrived. And it was certainly worth the wait. It is bigger and better than anyone expected. One of the most anticipated questions was whether the new number would rank Nigeria above South Africa. It does. It does not yet place Nigeria in the G20 group, but they are getting closer.

The size of the Nigerian economy almost doubled. The new total GDP for Nigeria for 2013 was announced as 80 trillion naira, compared to the old estimate for 2013 of 42 trillion Naira. In US dollars that’s an increase of about 250 billion to make 510 billion USD. How much is that? Well in 2012 I guesstimated for African Arguments that the expected increase in Nigeria may mean that at the time there were about 40 Malawi’s unaccounted for inside the Nigerian economy. It turns out there were 58.

It does raise a lot of questions. The first them being: How could this happen and how good are these numbers?

Upon hearing that the Nigerian GDP doubled due to a GDP rebasing, most economists would immediately think that this does not make sense. That’s because the change in base year just tells you that the reference year, or the year for which prices are held constant when you estimate GDP at fixed prices, has changed. So that should mean that prices change, but not output. This is because the base year changes coincide with a lot of new information on different parts of the economy.

When Ghana changed the base year from 1993 to 2006 for their national accounts estimation in 2010 it also led to a doubling in GDP, and as I explained in 2012, the base year changes are very important for many reasons, but first of all because “the data sources and the use of proxies are set in the base year. Even when new information is becoming available, national accountants may be unwilling or unable to add this data to the GDP series”. This process is explained in my book Poor Numbers, and in my most recent book Economic Growth and Measurement Reconsidered. In the latter I show how the picture of the economy and the rates of economic growth completely changed when base years changed in Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia.

But the new numbers from Nigeria raise a lot of pertinent questions. I will answer some of them below.

Why did it take 24 years?

The last time Nigeria changed the base year was in 1990. How could a quarter of a century pass without anyone (or at least very few people) asking some questions? First of all, Nigeria is not alone. As I discuss in Poor Numbers and in an updated study here on African Arguments, there were and still are many countries with base years from the 1980s and the 1990s. Zambia just switched from 1994 to 2010 and increased GDP by about 25 percent.

For Nigeria, some speculate that the GDP rebasing was delayed during the Obasanjo administration because Nigeria was successfully pursuing debt-relief.  I think it is a bit simpler than that. Having good economic statistics has, in the past, not been perceived as being particularly important – it requires a concentrated effort and strategic plan to actually conduct the rebasing. As I already mentioned, it is not the technical part that is the problem, it is a basic lack of information and recording (this cannot not be fixed with a simple snap of the fingers). And the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics cannot go at it alone. There are several examples of failed rebasing exercises where consultants have come up with a new number, but ultimately it was not accepted by the World Bank and the IMF. Liberia tried three times. Even for Ghana it took a year before the numbers were accepted.

How good are the new numbers?

The new GDP number is made up from lot of guesses. It is better than the previous guess, but it still has a big margin of error attached to it. The problem with generating a new and better GDP number is that it has to be based on new and better facts. In Nigeria it was known that the old GDP series did not capture mobile phones and Nollywood, and that the old employment structure from 1990 assumed that three quarters of the labor force was employed in agriculture. That was wrong and problematic, but as a statistician it is hard to justify changing the raw data without replacing them with new raw data.

When the first plan was made to rebase it could not be carried out because there was not enough information available. In a presentation made to describe the process, Statistician General Dr Yemi Kale asked – where are the numbers? The main reason the rebasing has been delayed has been a lack of basic information from businesses, farmers and households on their output, consumption and income. Through an intensive effort some of these data have been made available to put the new accounts on what is considered firm ground by the NBS and international organizations.  But there are still big gaps. Remember the Ghana rebasing? In the case of Ghana the main data source was new VAT numbers, but that is by definition recorded economy and therefore the informal economy still goes on unrecorded. Nigeria faces the same data constraints, and there are many who are not counted in the new numbers.

So now we know what the Nigerian economy looked like between 2010 and 2013 – what about the other years?

I am an economic historian, so this is what intrigues me the most. Instead of putting together a new series that could show how the economy went from 1000 USD per capita to almost 3000 USD per capita, we are presented with a new number for 2010.  Where did this doubling of GDP come from? What we are faced with is a problem of having a reasonably accurate picture of the Nigerian economy in 2010, and a reasonably accurate picture of the Nigerian economy in 1990. Right now we do not know how they compare, and how much of the difference in GDP was due to different definitions and data in 1990 compared to 2010.

In comparison, when European economies updated from the 1968 to the 1993 Standards of National Accounts, GDP only increased by 5-10 percent, and the new series was backdated to the 1960s or 1970s. Lack of historical data in the intervening years will make it difficult to recast the series.  If you look at the distribution of the economic sectors between agriculture, industry and services it is striking, just like it was in Ghana, that the rebasing has meant that the economies have moved from being based primarily on agriculture and mineral extraction to predominantly service-based.

On the old series, value added from services was smaller than from agriculture and it was only half of industrial value added. On the new GDP division however, services are bigger than agriculture and industry combined. Industrial value added has even decreased from the old series to the new series, not only in proportional terms but also in absolute terms. This is worrying for a couple of reasons. For most countries (apart from India), the service sector has been a poor engine of growth. Secondly, the quality of numbers on production, value and intermediate consumption on small and medium scale services is very poor.

What about the decisions that were made on the old data before the new data was made available? Yemi Kale answered the question posed by the Nigerian Daily Independent enigmatically:

Q: Does it mean we have been planning with wrong data?

A: We have not been planning with wrong data, we have been planning with accurate data – the difference is that the data we are planning with has to be updated with the most reliable estimates.

This may sound like gibberish, but it is the answer of a statistician. What Kale means is that they are all defensible statistics based on methods and raw data. They just give you different information. I would argue that it gives you different information which in turn would impact your planning decisions.

What is new about poverty and inequality in Nigeria?

This is what really matters. It is like a weight watcher being shown a new set of scales. It turns out that the previous measurement was all wrong. Now it has been changed, but in the meantime Nigeria should not compare its own weight with that of its neighbors until we are sure they are using the same scale. As for loosing and gaining – well, we only really have data for the past three years.

But that is all GDP and aggregates. What happened to poverty and inequality? I am having real difficulty squaring the growth with the poverty. The most recent poverty survey, which is based on sampling information on expenditure and consumption, was conducted in 2010.  The National Bureau of Statistics said 60.9% of Nigerians in 2010 were living in “absolute poverty” and that this figure had risen from 54.7% in 2004.  If this number is correct, then income inequality must be increasing much more than we thought. There are worries that the 2004 number was too low (for political reasons), and that therefore the comparison between 2004 and 2010 paints an unrealistic picture. Nevertheless, the absolute poverty number in 2010 is hard to square with the new high output numbers. Other numbers,based on sampling opinions, indicate that Africa and Nigeria are not rising quite as fast as the official numbers would have you think.

***

The bottom line is that Africa and Nigeria are no longer the bottom billion. There is growth, and while investors, journalists, scholars and others want to know how much and how fast, the short answer is that we do not know. For a long while no one wanted to know, and now we have to be patient. The gaps in information are too large to be filled overnight. GDP in Nigeria doubled on a Sunday afternoon, and that is an accurate diagnosis of our knowledge problem.

Morten Jerven is Associate Professor at the Simon Fraser University, School for International Studies. His book Poor Numbers: how we are misled by African development statistics and what to do about it is published by Cornell University Press.

 

 

On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 12:39 AM, Okwy Okeke <okwudili98@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

 

The Economist explains

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The Economist explains

How Nigeria’s economy grew by 89% overnight

Apr 7th 2014, 23:50 by J.O’S. | JOHANNESBURG

•  
•  

ON SATURDAY, April 5th, South Africa was Africa’s largest economy. The IMF put its GDP at $354 billion last year, well ahead of its closest rival for the crown, Nigeria. By Sunday afternoon that had changed. Nigeria’s statistician-general announced that his country’s GDP for 2013 had been revised from 42.4 trillion naira to 80.2 trillion naira ($509 billion). The estimated income of the average Nigerian went from less than $1,500 a year to $2,688 in a trice. How can an economy grow by almost 90% overnight?

Nigeria has a deserved reputation for corruption, so a sceptic might think the doubling of its economy a result of fiddling the numbers. In fact it is the old numbers that are dodgy. An economy’s real growth rate is typically measured by reference to prices in a base year. In Nigeria the reference year for the old estimate of GDP was 1990. The IMF recommends that base years be updated at least every five years. Nigeria left it far too long; as a result, its old GDP figures were hopelessly inaccurate.

The new figures use 2010 as the base year. Why was the upgrade so big? To come up with an estimate of GDP, statisticians need to add together estimates of output from a sample of businesses in every part of the economy, from farming to service industries. The weight they give to each sector depends on its importance to the economy in the base year. A snapshot of Nigeria’s economy in 1990 gave little or no weight to fast-growing parts of the economy such as mobile telephony or the movie industry. At the time the state-owned telephone company had a few hundred thousand customers. Today the country has 120m mobile-phone subscriptions. On the old 1990 figures, the telecoms sector was less than 1% of GDP; it is now almost 9% of GDP. Motion pictures had not shown up at all in the old figures, but the industry’s size is now put at 1.4% of GDP. Nigeria’s number-crunchers have improved the gathering of statistics in other ways. The old GDP figures were based on an estimate of output. The new figures are cross-checked against separate surveys of spending and income. The sample on which the data are based has increased from around 85,000 establishments to 850,000. Only businesses with a fixed location are included: the traders who weave precariously between the traffic are not captured. Even so, many small businesses are now part of the GDP picture.

Of course, Nigerians are no richer than they were on Saturday night. The majority of the country's 170m people live on less than a dollar a day. What the revised GDP figures show is that its economy is far more than just an oil enclave, exporting crude to pay for imported goods from richer countries. The oil industry’s share of GDP is now put at just 14%, compared with 33% according to the old figures. Manufacturing is much larger than previously thought. Services are booming. It is still a tough place in which to do business. But any company or investor who wants exposure to Africa’s fast-growing markets cannot afford to pass the continent’s largest economy by.

Dig deeper:
How do countries calculate GDP? The Economist explains (March 2014)
The sacking of Nigeria's central-bank chief has reversed the country's recent progress (March 2014)
Nigeria, Africa's giant, is waking up, but still looks unsteady on its feet (April 2013)

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/04/economist-explains-1

- See more at: How Nigeria’s economy grew by 89% overnight

			How Nigeria’s economy grew by 89% overnight ON SATURDAY, April 5th, South Africa was Africa’s largest economy. The IMF put its GDP at $354 billion last year, well ahead of its closest rival for the crown,...
			View on www.economist.com	Preview by Yahoo

 

 

------------------------------------------
We face forward,...we face neither East or West: we face forward.......Kwame Nkrumah

 

---

From: Okey Iheduru <okeyiheduru@gmail.com>
To:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, 9 April 2014, 16:36
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Voodoo statistics

 

"Poverty Porn" can be as addictive and self-destructive as the real thing itself. 

 

No self-respecting economist, including the "few of us Nigerians [who claim to] know a little about economics and statistics and how these figures are cooked up", would engage in this trashy talk if s/he truly understands the meaning and rationale for re-basing economic growth/GDP figures after 20 years. Few, if any of the hacks lampooning the Nigerian Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister of the Economy have even read or apprised themselves of the statistical methods and formal models used by the National Bureau for Statistics--in Nigeria and elsewhere--to arrive at their conclusions. 

 

No government official has ever said Nigeria wasn't "poor" in the sense in which some of these arm-chair critics use that word. India today has more poor people than the whole world collectively had in 1960. Does that detract from the fact that India is a member of the BRICS today? When South Africa and Ghana re-based their economies it was o.k., but not so for Nigeria because we're addicted to this pervasive self-flagellation and pornographic portrayal of Nigeria. Ghana has more poor people today than she did in 1960; and Accra metro alone has three times more poor people today than it did in 2000. Does that detract from Ghana's economic ranking today. 

 

It would help if everyone would please first go and revisit their "Ordinary" Level Economics lessons about "economic growth" and "gross domestic product" (GDP) before coming on to the public square to make statements that essentially differentiate between the educated and the uneducated.

 

Peace as always.

 

On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 2:13 AM, Tt Ogiri <ttogiri@gmail.com> wrote:

I love Ngozi, she is an intelligent woman, but has progressively joined the ranks and files of Nigerian leader who look us in the face and lie to us. That is under estimating our intelligence and it hurts. A few of us Nigerians know a little about economics and statistics and how these figures are cooked up. Nigeria is poor period!!! You can say whatever you want on your campaign trail, or when lobbying for another appointment.  Fellow Nigerians, remember that Ngozi lives in an energy efficient house, with uninterrupted water supply, she has not taken a walk or even driven to any market in Abuja, road side, Wuse, or Ultramodern, in the last how many years. She lives the same life style here as she does in Washington DC, and she is paid very well, with other perks, to say what she says, and unfortunately she is not the only Nigerian doing this right among us. I just feel a little disappointment, because I have a higher expectation of women that I consider intelligent. God Bless Nigeria. Tt

On Monday, April 7, 2014 10:07:05 PM UTC+1, jib...@gmail.com wrote:

Poverty of Voodoo Statistics: Politicks and the Contribution of Nollywood

 

Jibrin Ibrahim, Deepening Democracy Column, Daily Trust, 7^th April 2014

 

Yesterday, our dear country Nigeria leap-frogged South Africa and became Africa’s largest economy. We did this by changing the base line for calculating our GDP from 1990 to 2000. This rebasing boosted our economic growth by about 75%. The economy grew from $292 billion dollars to $510 billion in one day. By this statistical feat, we have progressed from the 37^th to the 26^rd largest economy in the world. The economy of South Africa is a mere $384 billion so let’s all feel good; we are the greatest in Africa. My very warm congratulations to our Minister of Finance who made the announcement yesterday.

The South Africans have upset our feelings by being members of G20 thereby stealing our position as the greatest African nation and now we can begin our revenge. The most painful was when the BRIC quickly developing countries, namely Brazil, Russia, India China were to be expanded by one, we all expected it would become BRINC with the edition of Nigeria. Instead, it became BRICS with the addition of South Africa. Now its settled, we have the largest African economy since 2 p.m. yesterday afternoon.

Let me say up front that I do not think that we are falsifying facts, even if we are embellishing them a little bit. Most governments overhaul GDP calculations every five years to reflect changes in output and consumption and we have not done ours for over twenty years. When Ghana rebased its GDP in 2010, output jumped 60 percept and from one day to the next, Ghana became a middle-income country. For Nigeria, our government is hoping that being the continent's number one economy could prove an irresistible magnet for foreign investors. Under the leadership of Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, what we did was to update the contributions of new sectors of the economy. Nollywood come in very useful as the estimate of its annual contribution to the Nigerian economy jumped from $500 million to $7 billion, an incredible jump maybe, but why not, it’s all about good fiction. Thanks to the rapid growth of the telecommunications sector, Nigeria has become Africa's biggest mobile market with an estimated 167 million subscriptions, according to the Nigerian Communications Commission.

There is no doubt that Nigeria has been growing as a destination for foreign investors owing to the size of its consumer market and the increasing recovery of the capital market. Shoprite and Walmart are moving in massively into the country precisely because of the growth of the consumer market. The consumer industries such as Nestle, Heineken, Cadbury and Unilever are doing very well. Our own Dangote Cement has already made the transition from a Nigerian to an African giant. There is a credible narrative about the growth of the Nigerian economy.  The problem with statistics however is that they only tell part of the story. In reality, the 75% growth of our economy that happened yesterday would not mean any change in the lives of ordinary Nigerians. We will continue to live without electricity supply and potable water. The potholes on our roads will not disappear. And the insecurity in the land will continue.  Our economy is today apparently larger than that of Austria, Malaysia and Thailand.

The real issue for me however is what does it really mean to say our economy is the largest in Africa. Nigeria remains a very poor country with almost 70% of the population living below the poverty line. No Nigerian city has potable water for up to 30% of inhabitants. South Africa has a population of 52 million people compared to Nigeria’s 170 million. South Africa's GDP per capita is however $7,508 compared to $1,555 for Nigeria according to 2012 statistics. South Africa’s electricity production is 40,000 megawatts and will double by 2025 to continue feeding its large industrial base while in Nigeria; we are currently struggling to produce 3,000 megawatts. 

Just last week, the World Bank President classified Nigeria among the world’s five extreme poor countries. In a quick response, the Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, challenged the classification, which is based on the large number of poor people living in the country. She argued that using the number of poor people in a country, irrespective of the country’s level of development, as the parameter to rate Nigeria among nations with high poverty levels, was wrong. She added that the phenomenon of large number of poor people was peculiar to middle-income countries, which Nigeria belonged. Citing the example of India, a middle-income country, which is one of the largest economies in the world like Nigeria, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala said the largest number of poor people in the world reside in India, China and other places. Nigeria, she concluded, was no exception, as the reality today was that most middle-income countries, including Brazil, have large number of poor people.

 

For 100 million Nigerians living below the poverty line, what is the comfort of knowing that there are also lots of poor people in other developing countries such as Brazil and India? For Nigerians, the real problem is that they do not see the benefits of the 15 years of constant economic growth that we have had. Yes, it’s true that they have seen more Nigerians join the Forbes list of the world’s richest people but the Nigerian people know that their lives and livelihoods are worsening every day.

 

This is where I have a problem with the positive spin Dr. Okonjo-Iweala is always giving the economy. Again last week, she announced with glee that “after two months of methodological work, the statisticians have come up with the data that 1.8 million people in the country enter the job market yearly. I am happy to tell you that last year we were able to create 1.6 million jobs. So we are getting close to the 1.8 million that enter the job market.” She must be the only person in Nigeria to believe that we created 1.6 million jobs last year. What we do know is that the National Bureau of Statistics is under enormous pressure to produce positive economic spin. What we see with our eyes is the pathetic photographs of hundreds of thousands of young people desperately struggling for the Nigerian Immigration Service jobs and being killed in the process. She should take us seriously and show us where the jobs were created and who got them. In most countries, job statistics is not under the control of government and is done by independent bodies. Why do we have a situation in which government officials can tell us anything they want to on job creation? The new statistics may be true but voodoo too as all Africans know is a true science. Voodoo statistics can make us feel good but it’s more important to address the problems of 100 million Nigerians living below the poverty line.

 

 

 

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Okey Iheduru, PhD
You can access some of my papers on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) at: http://ssrn.com/author=2131462.

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