Blessing Ibunge in Port Harcourt
Rivers State Governor, Siminalayi Fubara, has expressed his administration’s commitment to uphold accountable, data-based governance to spread development to every nook and cranny of the state.
Speaking at the opening of the 2025 second bi-annual meeting of the National Consultative Committee on Statistics with the theme: ‘Harnessing the Power of Statistics for Nigeria’s Sustainable Development and Economic Transformation’, in Port Harcourt yesterday.
Governor Fubara, represented by the state Head of Service, Inyingi S.I. Brown, noted that statistics are critical for the inclusive socio-economic growth of a country like Nigeria with a vast population and diverse ethnicities.
The governor explained that statistics provide the empirical foundation upon which sound policies are built, stressing that they enable governments to identify development gaps, allocate resources efficiently, measure progress, and assess impact.
“For a country like Nigeria, with its vast population and diverse socio-economic realities, the effective use of statistics is critical to achieving inclusive growth, reducing poverty, and fostering economic transformation.
“I am encouraged by the deliberate and purposeful efforts being made by the federal government under the visionary leadership of His Excellency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, to reposition statistics as a critical driver of national development.
“The present administration has continued to emphasise the importance of credible data in policy formulation, fiscal planning, economic management, and the effective implementation of social and economic reform programmes under the Renewed Hope Agenda,” he said.
The state governor pledged his administration’s readiness to key into the data-based governance revolution sparked by the federal government for sustainable development.
“At the sub-national level, we in Rivers State fully align with this national vision. Our administration is firmly committed to evidence-based governance. We believe that policies must be guided by facts, not assumptions, and by data, not conjecture.
Consequently, we continue to support initiatives aimed at strengthening statistical capacity, improving data collection systems, and promoting inter-agency collaboration for data harmonisation and utilisation,” he said.
The nation’s Statistician-General, Adeyemi Adeniran, in his keynote address, said the bi-annual meeting was a necessary ingredient for the realisation of the vision for a well-coordinated statistical system capable of sharpening analytical tools for development planning.
“We just launched the power of data high-impact initiative as well as the national strategy for the development of statistics (NSDS) in the country. The NSDS is the framework that will guide the way and manner in which data will be produced in the country’s data systems in the next four to five years.
“In that framework, we have put together all the impetus that is required to produce data in a modernised way, to encourage synergy within the system,” he said.
Adeniran called on all stakeholders within the data development ecosystem to work towards strengthening the nation’s data system for sustainable development.
Earlier, the Permanent Secretary, Rivers State Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning, Imaoyani George, said hosting the bi-annual meeting in the state attests to the high premium that Governor Fubara places on statistics and data-based governance, adding that: “No statistics, no development.”
