Insecurity: How Borno State was excluded from NBS surveys

From Isaac Anumihe, Abuja

Statistician  General of the Federation, Dr Simon Harry, has lamented that the spate of insecurity has affected its surveys to the extent that Borno State was excluded in the last survey.

Speaking to Daily Sun,  Harry explained that if  out of 37 states,  only one state is not captured, it does not affect the final result  of the survey.

“And so by standard,  if out of 37 states, we are able to get three quarters of the states. That gives us the picture of the poverty profile of the country, because at the end of the day, we are going to use weight to blow off the information that you would have analysed and that would now give a fair representation of the entire country”, he said.

He said that on some occasions, the bureau uses security agents to conduct its surveys. But when the security is not enough, the area can be avoided.

“Agreed,  there are some areas that are unreachable. But in a situation where we are conducting a survey, there are occasions that we use security agents to take us to some households. But in some other cases, when  the areas are unreachable——–take for instance,  the last Nigerian Living Standard Survey (NLSS) that  we conducted which helped us to come up with the poverty profile of the country, we had to exclude the whole of Borno State because we didn’t get  half of the information we were supposed to gather. And so, Borno State  didn’t feature in the poverty profile produced in 2018 and 2019 because the information we were able to gather were not enough for us to be able  to determine the poverty profile of that state. So, the best thing for us to do was to exclude Borno State from the report.

“But for some other states, we were able to get a sufficient information that we analysed. Besides, when you talk of cycle production we are talking of an estimate that is  well representative and that can give you a clearer picture of what is actually on ground”, he said.

The Statistician General,  who is also the Chief Executive Officer of National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), equally told Daily Sun, that the Statistics Act of 2007 empowers the bureau to levy organisations that fail to provide information.

“However, there’s a provision of N100,000 in the Statistics Act that,  in the event that  anybody refuses  to provide you with information,  such a person should be levied N100,000. You know we are a developing economy. I know for a developing economy, for you to get the desired result of almost everything,  you should not be said to be applying force. Again, also as a country that is a federated state,  definitely you have to take it gradually. And that is why the act provides that we adopt more of persuasion than coarcion in collecting information from individuals” he said.