NBS ‘has no data’ to back Ngige’s claim of 7 million new jobs

- NBS has faulted Ngige’s claim that federal government created seven million jobs

- The minister of labour and employment, Chris Ngige had said that the government had created seven million jobs for unemployed Nigerian youth

- Kale said that the NBS has not produced any data on job creation

The statistician general of the federation, Yemi Kale, has said that the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has no data on the job creation claims made by Chris Ngige, minister of labour and employment.

Cable reports that the data chief made this statement in an interview with Abang Mercy.

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Legit.ng gathered that Ngige had earlier said the Muhammadu Buhari-led administration has created seven million jobs through its programmes.

But Kale said during the interview said that: “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.”

Meanwhile, Legit.ng had previously reported that the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has said that about 7.5 million Nigerians have been unemployed between January 2016 and December 30, 2017.

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The bureau in its report released on Sunday, Janaury 21, in Abuja said 77.55 million of Nigeria’s labour population of 85.1 million were engaged in some sort of economic activity for at least an hour a week.

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Source: Legit.ng