Another census due after 20 years, CISON demands

Twenty years after the last census, the Chartered Institute of Statisticians of Nigeria (CISON) has called for another census.

Fielding questions from newsmen to mark the institute’s 50th anniversary, the president of the institute, Dr Godwin Ebuh, disclosed that the last census was conducted in 2006. It is now 20 years after the last headcount.

He advised that the next headcount is highly overdue.

“We have even dedicated a conference to the issue around census. Government needs to look into census. How do you plan for your people that you don’t have their number? You are estimating. We are calling on government to engineer a drastic reform that will make our census credible. We are now calling on government to take urgent action to ensure that we conduct a census,” he advised.

Concerning the inflation data which has come under serious dispute, Ebuh promised to engage with the NBS to make stakeholders understand the methodologies it is using.

“Engage the NBS, and that’s what the institute does — to make sure that stakeholders are carried along in what the NBS is doing. NBS on its own does a whole lot of stakeholder engagement on these things.

“NBS covers several markets across both rural and urban areas in putting that together. So they look at state-by-state index. Inflation is quite different from the national. It varies. There are some states that are sometimes very high — almost times two of the national. And then you see some that are even lower than the national.

“And once you understand the methodology that they are using, using your single point of purchase as a way to measure inflation is very, very erroneous,” the president said.

Ebuh also stated that as a statistical body, the organisation uses a lot of AI tools. In the workshop organised by the institute, over 200 people were exposed to AI.

“Our workshop focused on the use of Python and other machine-learning tools, which are mostly AI tools that you use. So we exposed close to 200 of our members, including those that joined online, to build that capacity,” he said.