The National Bureau of Statistics, the official arm of the Federal Government responsible for data capturing in Nigeria says that it does not know about any 7 million jobs allegedly created by President Muhammad Buhari’s administration.
The minister of Labour and productivity, Dr. Chris Ngige had said that Buhari has created 7 million jobs through his administrations programmes and policies.
Instead, the NBS had reported in December 2017 that the unemployment in the country had actually risen under Buhari to over 35.7 million people both unemployed and/or underemployed in Nigeria.
The statistician general of the federation, Yemi Kale said no such data of 7 million jobs creation was available to the Statistics Bureau.
Speaking to Mercy Abang of The Cable, 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.
“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.”
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