States urged to set up statistics agency for dev’t planning

State governments have been urged to establish statistics agencies to garner data that could be used for development purposes.

The call which was made by the Executive Chairman of Africa Centre for Shared Development Capacity Building (ACSDCB), Prof Olu Ajakaiye, during a virtual conference yesterday, noted that the absence of effective data generation for planning and governance was hindering development in sub-nationals.

Speaking on the theme: “The role of data in development planning at the subnational level,”Ajakaiye said the agency would serve as a measuring tool to investigate the level of achievement of government policies.

He said: “I remember that Lagos had a wonderful statistical agency to the point that they had their own list of business entities in which they published annually.

“Let us have in every state a very robust state statistical law that will criminalize refusal to respond to requests by the state statistical agency. The NBS law is so strong that you can’t refuse to respond to NBS when they come knocking at your door.”

He also called on the need to depoliticize data in the country which he said was due to lack of “knowledge oriented politically leadership’ adding that, “if we have such leaders, they will the know the information content of data and when someone say Lagos is the leading contributor to GDP, it should not make River State feel uncomfortable but energies them to also catch up which will create progressive competition and not adversarial competition.”

On his part, The Chief Executive Officer of Analyst Data Services and Resources (ADSR), Dr. Afolabi Olowokere, disclosed that the economic model it used indicated that the GDP of Lagos grew to N38.14trn in 2022 while that of FCT moved to N23trn.

He said the state with the least GDP in the country was Yobe State which has 2.80trn.

For Economic growth, he stated that Borno State experienced the highest and when considering the crises in the state, it is supposed to do more adding that it is followed by Nasarawa, Oyo and Ebonyi States.

He said the economy of states like Delta, Rivers, Bayelsa and Akwa Ibom contracted because  48 and 55 per cent of their economy was based on crude oil production.