NESG: Nigeria Should Prioritize Data, Food Production

The Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG), Dr. Tayo Aduloju, has called on the federal and state governments to invest more on data as lack of adequate data can hinders planning, economic growth and development.

Speaking at the quarterly media engagement of NESG over the weekend, Aduloju called on the government to prioritise data, and advocated for more funding for National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which according to him, is under-funded.

He said, “Generally speaking, we are under-collecting data to plan Nigeria and that must change. If you don’t have data to plan your local, state and federal activities then what is the basis of development. We can be working with approximate guesswork. The wider the guess, the more off track we would be. If you look at education, health agriculture and so on, you would still be working with approximate values of data. We must resolve this.”

On food crisis, Aduloju called for a collaborative effort among governments to address the increasing food crisis in the country, which according to him could lead to higher inflation. 

According to Aduloju, Nigeria currently cultivates far lesser land than what it used to produce adding that this was affecting general food output.

He noted that the nation’s population was growing faster than its ability to produce food.

“The first question we must ask ourselves is whether we are producing enough food. Is the availability of food at the scale we require? We’ve also pointed to all the security threats, we’ve broken security threats beyond human security to soil security, water security, land security, input security, so fertilizer, pesticides, etc. And pull that together to say that the system is under stress and it will be tackled with a system approach. There is also an affordability problem, what has been driving inflation is more than just the production of food, it is that the effects pass through on anything we import, “he said.