The Minister of the Federal Ministry of Budget and National Planning, Atiku Bagudu has urged Nigerians to extricate themselves from data imperialism.
He gave this advise while speaking at the 2024 African Statistics Day celebration in Abuja where he bemoaned the country’s continued reliance on other nations for data.
The theme of the event was “Supporting Education by modernising production of fit-for-purpose statistics.”
He said some countries have unmerited advantages in terms of data generation and presentation.
The Minister urged Nigeria and Africa to appreciate that some firms and countries skew data generation and presentation.
He called on Nigeria to also use its own data to tell its own stories.
Bagudu said: “Today, the market power of Amazon or Google determines what I buy. When COVID unfortunately struck the world, we saw data companies that were showing data about the movement of people. And it just shows that in a way, sorry to use this word, maybe data imperialism is still very active in the sense that some companies or some countries have an undue advantage when it comes to data generation and the way that data is presented.
According to him, all the data generated from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) are independent of government influence and are as such reliable enough to avoid miscommunication.
In his goodwill message, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Education Manager, Mr. Jutaro Sakamioto said education is proven as one of the most important investments.
According to him, it does not only empowers children and youth with the knowledge and skills they need to thrive in labour market and society but also drives economic and social development in the country.
The country with educated and productive citizens, he said, enjoys spillover effects such as increased tax revenue, decreased crime rate, and improved democracy with active citizenship.
