By Thompson ABISOLA
A statistician, Dr Olusanya Olubusoye has advised the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) to conduct more surveys on job creation, opportunities to show the country’s economic strength.
Olubusoye, a lecturer at the Department of Statistics, University of Ibadan, gave the advice in Abuja on Monday.
He said that the country needed more statistics on job creation, job opportunities, job losses, graduate production, technical and vocational education graduate production, and most sought after disciplines among others.
The statistician, however, said that the greatest unemployment challenge in Nigeria was youth unemployment.
“Closely related to that which is also a subset is graduate unemployment. What statistics are NBS generating on these critical components of unemployment statistics?
“The kind of statistics required to address these problems include: number of graduates produced by discipline, number of jobs created by public and private institutions.
“Also, statistics on number of job mismatches, for instance a graduate of engineering but employed as a primary school teacher, number of job vacancies advertised by qualification required and so on,’’ he said.
Meanwhile, the NBS said it published more than 80 per cent of reports slated for its Data Release Calendar for 2018
The bureau planned to release 179 data on different sectors of the economy in the year.
The statistician said the reports were mostly online and not published as printed materials.
“This often limits their circulation and usage. In the past, printed copies are sent to research/academic institutions and are readily accessed in the library by both staff and students,’’ he said.
In addition, Olubusoye advised the bureau to restore the consultative meeting of data producers and users which NBS used to organise.
He said such forum would help the bureau to know the impact of usage of its reports.
“This kind of interactive meetings helps NBS to know the kind of data users would need. So data are produced based on the need of the users.
“Hence, in spite of producing about 179 reports, the questions are: how many are demand driven? How many are donors driven?
“For instance, which of the reports is providing us the progress being made in the implementation of the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERPG) launched in 2017 by this government?
“How many of these reports focused on the IDPs? How many of them focused on security of life and property? How many of them focused on herdsmen/farmers conflicts?
“How many of them focused specifically on vote buying? These and many more are matters that concern us at the moment,’’ he said.
He, however, commended the NBS on the timely release of its data and the level of usage by researchers and other stakeholders.
