Consultant Urges States To Embrace Data Governance

A consultant on Statis
tics and Information Communication Technology (ICT), Mr Ekezie Obodozie, has advised state governments to embrace data governance to achieve sustainable development.
Obodozie, a retired director of ICT at the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), gave the advice in an interview with newsmen in Abuja recently.
The Tide reports that data governance is a set of processes that ensures that important data assets are formally managed throughout the enterprise.
Data governance ensures that data can be trusted and that people can be made accountable for any adverse event that happens because of low data quality.
He said that the state governments had to change their orientation that they could govern their states without the use of data.
“In Nigeria, most of the state governments have a mind-set that they can govern without data, following this mind-set it becomes difficult for them to achieve development.
“ It has affected them to the extent that even when NBS produces figures, the states do not access it,’’ he said.
Obodozie, however, recalled that he was privileged to encourage the Cross River Government to govern with data four years ago and the state got recognition from the World Bank because of that.
He said that he would soon be supporting Kano, Kaduna and Bauchi states to develop their statistical agencies.
Obodozie, also a lead Consultant at African Data Processing Network (ADPN), a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), said the NGO would partner with more state governments to develop their statistical agency.
“I have started sending my advocacy to most states, they need to develop their statistical unit and the moment they develop it; governance at the state level will be very easy.
“ Equally, if they develop the unit, governance will be very easy at the local government level.
“If they don’t develop it, it will be very difficult for them to manage their states.
“We are talking about poverty; many state governments don’t know how many people are poor in their states.
“We are talking about unemployment, so many of them don’t know the number of people that are unemployed in their states.
“ Some states have high death rate and they don’t know the number of people that were dead in their states,’’ he said.