Kale: I’m Not Excited When Data on Nigeria are Negative Continued on page 27

The Statistician General, National Bureau of Statistics, Dr. Yemi Kale, in this interview on ARISE TV, the sister broadcast station of THISDAY, spoke on a wide range of issues on the economy as well as the bureau’s methodology. Nume Ekeghe presents the ex

What are the challenges an organisation like yours faces, because one of the biggest things we hear from global bodies is that there are no data in Nigeria or Africa. Do you take offense to that? No, I think there is an element of truth to that. When i came into the office in 2011 there were very little or non-existent and what you are trying to do is almost build it up from scratch. I think we have done a lot and have made a lot of progress since then. The amount of data in Nigeria available has definitely increased significantly. Are there gap and are there lots of work to do, absolutely.

So it is process of building it up gradually from a point of no data existing to where we are now of publishing 3000 to 4000 indicators every year. We are coming from a point where we were publishing about 5-6 reports a year to now publishing 200 to 300 reports yearly. That is not all the data we need, but it is the most important data as far as the current demand for data in the Nigerian economy.

Sometimes institutions and individuals question the credibility of your data. Recently, the minister of labour Dr. Chris Ngige questioned the unemployment data of the third quarter of last year. How do you address such situations when NBS data’s credibility is being questioned? Questioning data is something that happens everywhere in the world. I remember even in the last United States (US) election the current president questioned the jobs and GDP numbers although now he celebrates those numbers from the same statistics agency.

So politicians would always question number. If you are a minister in a particular sector and the numbers suggests that are not doing better, you don’t really expect that such person would be excited at those numbers. So it is expected but we operate independently and we follow international convention and we are not particularly concerned about the criticisms as long as the criticisms are not based on the technical manner on which we got the data. If they had questioned the methodology processes then we would check them and then we would try to improve on them if we find out they are correct. But if it is just a general ‘I don’t agree with number’ without any particular basis then we are not particularly paying any attention to that.

Our job is to be independent and to produce data for evident based decision making. And I think what policy makers should do with these numbers if they can’t find anything wrong with the process is to go through them and use them for what there are supposed to be used for and that is to fix problems. But we don’t get involved in politics or get involved in exchanging or having arguments whether a data is correct or is not correct. We do our jobs and then leave it to policy makers for them to use the data for what are mean to use it for.

The unemployment report for the third quarter of last year has been a year now, when do we expect the next report? I am suspecting you are cueing into the rumours that because elections are coming, i have heard that rumour. Like I said, we don’t do politics and ironically you mentioned i got appointed currently by the current administration in 2016 and that was the period we announced the recession. So clearly a chief executive who is concerned about getting re-elected for a statistics office that is being politicised is not going to publish we are in a recession for 5 quarters when he expecting the current president to renew his appointment. That alone should show that there is no interference with the way we do our work.

It is funding, we require funding. Nigeria unlike other developed countries were everything is electronic you can seat down in a headquarters and data flies in. In Nigeria, unfortunately some of the challenges of collecting data are that you have to go out into the field. So we have staff in all the states and offices in all the states and their job is actually to go out into the field and collect this data. Now to go out into the field and collect these data, they need to collect their transport allowance and so on.

So if you have not gotten your budget signed and we know the budget was not signed until June so it means we don’t have any funds to work with. And when you have an employment study and a household study, it costs a lot of money so you need resources to go to the field and there is no way we can do that. So that is why there is a delay, unlike an inflation report that really does not cost that much money because you are just going to markets around. Or maybe a GDP report which you are looking at companies’ financials you don’t need that much money to get those records, so you can keep publishing those administrative records unlike a household survey or census where you have to go to households to get that information.

We have staffs in the south-south that have to rent boats to cross to the creeks to get these information and they are not going to use their salaries to do that, they need little sums of money to get these information. So it is extremely difficult and the resources are needed. So the reason is the funding was not approved until recently. Now the last question is when. Some resources was received about two three weeks ago.

By resources do you mean your budget and donor aides? Donors’ don’t give us money to do whatever we want to do with it. When they come in like the World Bank or the United Nations, they have specific indicators they are trying to collect. So they might not be interested in unemployment, they might be interested in education or some health related data. Now they give us that money after we have discussed what is required and we actually go and collect that information. So we can’t use donor resources to get other types of data that we need. The unemployment data is the data that we publish as a national statistics office and is funded by our government through our budget and it is in our capital budget. If you check the NBS you would see job creation and employment. And if the money is not received, then there is really nothing we can do about it.

So our staffs are on the field currently collecting that information and once they are done, positive or negative like we always do, we would publish it. Don’t get me wrong i am not excited when the numbers are negative because I am a Nigerian and i want things to be better. In fact, it is a burden when i see these numbers are negative it gets me depressed because I want things for my country. But we have to publish it as it is.

How do you collect the data for unemployment? The data to collect unemployment ironically is virtually the same around the world. People go out to get those data. I was actually surprised when i did some study of other countries and even the US also uses surveys to get their data. I assumed it was the unemployment benefits they used because they have those records and so on. But actually, they use that to track job creation and necessarily the unemployment rate.

That is why you can have a situation in the US were the unemployment rate rises and the same time job creation rate is rising and people are saying what is going on here. That is because the numbers of people that are looking for work in a particular period are higher than the number of jobs being created. So an economy can create a million jobs in one month but if there is a demand for 1.2 million jobs, that additional two hundred would be added to those unemployed and the rate would still go up.

So it is a very tricky way to understand how the numbers are collated. Virtually almost every country in the world uses labour force surveys; China, UK, US South Africa while ours is one of the largest in terms of the sample size that we use to collect this information. We have about one thousand one hundred staff across the country that go and get these numbers. I think it is about sixty thousand to seventy thousand households that are visited on a quarterly basis to gather this information.

So you are not just going to ask them if they have work or if they are employed because if you do that, you would get subjective views. For example if you ask me if I am employed, based on my pay check i might decide to say i am not employed. So we ask it like an interview. We can ask ‘so what did you do this week and the answer could be i work in my aunt’s shop but i am a graduate of economics. So of course you would say you are not working because you want to work as an accountant because you studied accountancy. But we would tick you as employed because you are engaging in economic activities.

In the north, when i start to speak Hausa for example, they tell me that if you translate ‘are you employed’ into Hausa it means more or less do you have a white collar job. So if you don’t explain, you would just hear them say no. But many of them are farmers, or have some corner shops, you would consider that work. There is definition of work internationally and whether you think this work is decent enough, that is a separate conversation. So you can be employed and be in poverty which creates that confusion among the public that would say unemployment is 90percent because to them, farmers and people who have corner shops or mama puts for example is not employment because they think work is when you have an ID card and you wear a nice suit that is when you call it work. So they expect the numbers to be bigger while that is not the reality or the definition of work.

From your data, is that also where you get the data of underemployment because of the questions you are asking? Yes so some are working but not getting their full potential that is why underemployment is larger that unemployment. Unlike countries were you have so much social benefits you can choose not to work because it is not worth your while. You can decide to just stay back home and get my check every month. In Nigeria, you don’t have such benefit so you have to work. So when you look for that big banker job and you can’t get it, after a while you would start engaging in something else to make yourself survive. And then you move from unemployment to underemployment because you are now working below your educational qualifications and skills.

Most Nigerians have to go into underemployment because they can’t find that proper white collar job that they are looking for. So underemployment is almost two times as high as unemployment which means you are actually just sitting down at home doing nothing and you find very few Nigerians absolutely doing nothing. So most of them would be doing something and then they would move to the underemployment bracket.

The economy grew about 1.9 percent in the first quarter of this year and I’m sure you are on brink of releasing your second quarter GDP report. I know you might not want to release the report but with what you have seen so far, do think the economy would perform better in the second quarter and how is the heightened political risk we see now affecting the fortress of the economy and should that be a concern?

The easier question is the first one ironically because I am not going to give the final figures and because the work is still being completed. And even if i had the numbers I wouldn’t anyways but i dint even have them. But from the numbers i am seeing, it is looking quite flat surprisingly I expected the number should be much better but it is looking very similar to the first quarter. I think the economy is still struggling out of recession and that is what the numbers are showing.

So would you call that stagnation? There is a technical definition for stagnation and there is an English definition. Now the English definition; yes you might say stagnation but the technical definition No. technical definition requires rising unemployment and rising inflation. But inflation has been trending downwards so you can’t actually use the definition of stagnation technically. The economy is still just moving very slowly.

The IMF and World Bank are projecting 2.1 to 2.5 percent increase for the year, are we on trend? For the year i think it is still doable and that takes me the second part of the question. The political season in Nigeria and in most developing countries always affects the economy and it could be positive or negative. It could be positive in the sense that if the atmosphere is not too toxic then you could have an increase in economic activities where people and politicians are spending and there is a lot of money in the system. At the same time, when it is toxic, your foreign investors get sacred and they are taking their money away and i think that is what is happening in the Nigerian stock market. They get terrified and they start pulling their money out. And the local investors adopt a wait and see approach and nobody wants to pump in money because they are a bit concerned unlike a US economy for example where people realise that regardless of what noise is being made, the economy is structured to work in a particular way and are developed. So they can make as much noise but the system would continue to remain. But in Nigeria, we understand that the system and the eventual system is tied to whomever wins so everybody is a bit nervous as to who would win the election and if he would change the policy that has been worked on last year. So they hold their funds and watch what is happening, but when it gets toxic, it has a way of squeezing the economy. People stop hiring because they do not want to expand; they hold back all their investment decisions because they want to see what is happening. For example, one of the numbers we are seeing are challenges in Agric because the clashes happening.

So the herdsmen clashes are begging to impact on agriculture? Yes obviously, if people cannot go to their farms, it is going to be a problem. And by the way, agriculture is not just crop. So when you destroy farm land or livestock so this back and forth thing is affecting crops and livestock. And agriculture is the biggest part of our GDP so it has a way of slowing down economic activity.

The economic intelligence numbers about Lagos as city and that Lagos is the third worst city in the world to live in. Looking at the indicator like that which states Damascus as the worst city to live in, what does that data mean to you? I was thinking that if Lagos in Nigeria is one of worst places to live in considering many other states in Nigeria that is horrible.

Considering Lagos is one of the best places to live within Nigeria so that is what came to my mind. But when we see these things, we have to understand that those that compile the indicators are looking at certain things. And Sometimes they would look at things that might not be considered important to a Nigerian. You might see things like the quality of the air.

The criteria they used were healthcare, education, transportation and infrastructure, so those are major social indicators? I am not saying the indicators were wrong, but i am saying the first thing to look at is the indicators and if those indicators they are looking at are things that matter to us in Nigeria then we need to be very concerned.

Is Lagos the third worst place to live in the world, i would not know because i have not been to other cities in the world.

Kale