In God we trust, all others bring data. – W. Edwards Deming

In 2023, I was working on a business plan for a client who wanted to launch a logistics company in Kano State. Simple enough, right? Except it wasn’t. We needed basic data. 

The population of Kano metropolitan area, number of registered businesses, average household income, road network coverage, number of delivery addresses and that is where it became a nightmare. You would think this information would be readily available for the most populous state in Nigeria. You would be wrong. 

The population figure we found ranged from 9 million to 16 million depending on which source you used. The Natonal Bureau of Statistics had one number, the state government had another. The UN population estimates had a third. 

The World Bank used yet another figure. And the last actual census was in 2006, nearly two decades ago, when the Kano population was counted at about 9.4 million. In a state growing at maybe 3 percent annually, the current population could be anything. We were literally guessing and our guesses were not even informed by any reliable data. 

The number of registered businesses? No comprehensive database exists. Average household income? The NBS does household surveys, but the sample sizes are small, the methodology is questionable, and the data is years out of date by the time it is published. Road network coverage? I called three different agencies and got three completely different answers. 

Number of delivery addresses? Nigeria does not have a functional address system. Most streets in Kano do not have names. Most houses do not have numbers. How do you run a delivery company in a country where you cannot describe where people live?

That experience crystallized something I had been thinking about for years. Nigeria does not have a data problem, Nigeria has a data crisis. We are running a country of over 200 million people essentially blind. We do not know how many we are. 

We do not know where we live. We do not know what we earn. We do not know what we produce. We do not know what we consume. And because we do not know any of this, every policy decision is a guess, every budget is fiction, and every business projection is built on vibes and In Sha Allah.

This is not a minor administrative inconvenience. This is a fundamental governance failure that affects every aspect of Nigerian life, from healthcare to education to infrastructure to security. You cannot solve problems you cannot measure. You cannot allocate resources to populations you cannot count. You cannot plan for a future you cannot model. And yet here we are, the giant of Africa, stumbling around in the dark because we refuse to turn on the light.

The Census Catastrophe

Let us start with the most basic data point of all. How many Nigerians are there? The honest answer is nobody knows. Nigeria’s last census was in 2006. It counted 140 million people, a number that was immediately controversial. 

Northern states claimed they were undercounted. Southern states claimed the north was overcounted. Ethnic groups accused each other of inflating numbers for political advantage. The census became not a statistical exercise but a political weapon, because in Nigeria, population determines revenue allocation, political representation, and power.

The 2006 census itself was riddled with problems. Enumerators were poorly trained. Some areas were inaccessible due to security concerns. The technology was outdated. There were widespread allegations of manipulation. 

The results were challenged in court by several states. And yet, nearly twenty years later, this deeply flawed count remains the official basis for planning in Africa largest economy. The World Bank and the UN use projections based on this flawed baseline, which means their estimates are also unreliable.

A new census has been planned, postponed, replanned, and re-postponed multiple times. The National Population Commission has been promising a new census for over a decade. Each time, the exercise is derailed by political disagreements, funding shortfalls, or security concerns.

Meanwhile, the gap between our population estimates and reality grows wider every year. Are we 210 million? 220 million? 230 million? Nobody can say with confidence, and the margin of error is not a few percentage points but potentially tens of millions of people.

The political dimension of the census cannot be overstated. In Nigeria, population is money and power. Federal revenue allocation is partly based on population. States with larger populations get more money. The number of House of Representatives seats is based on population. So every census becomes a high-stakes political battle. 

Until we can decouple the census from resource allocation, or find some way to make the count politically neutral, we will continue to fight over numbers instead of collecting them.

NBS and the Methodology Problem

The National Bureau of Statistics is supposed to be the authoritative source of data on the Nigerian economy and society. In fairness, the NBS does important work with limited resources. But the limitations are severe, and they undermine the reliability of virtually everything the NBS publishes.

Take the unemployment figure for example. For years, the NBS reported Nigeria’s unemployment rate as being in the low single digits, which was laughable to anyone who had walked through any Nigerian city and seen the armies of young people with nothing to do. The problem was methodological. 

The NBS was using the International Labour Organization definition of unemployment, which counted anyone who had done even one hour of work in the past week as employed. A man who washed one car for two hundred naira on a Saturday was classified as employed. A woman who sold three sachets of pure water on a Monday was employed. The definition bore no relationship to the reality of Nigerian labour markets.

Eventually, the NBS adopted a broader measure that better captured underemployment and disguised unemployment, and suddenly the combined unemployment and underemployment rate jumped to over 33 percent. The economy had not changed. The measurement had changed. And this raises the question, how much of what we think we know about Nigeria is an artifact of how we measure, rather than a reflection of reality?

The GDP rebasing exercise of 2014 is another instructive example. Nigeria rebased its GDP calculations and overnight, the economy nearly doubled in size, from about $270 billion to $510 billion. Nigeria became the largest economy in Africa, overtaking South Africa. Nothing had actually changed in the real economy. 

No new factories had opened. No new oil wells had started producing. The same roads were still broken. The same hospitals were still understaffed. All that had changed was the methodology.

The NBS also suffers from severe data lag. Economic data is often published months or even years after the reference period. By the time you get the inflation figure for January, it might be March or April. By the time you get the poverty data, the situation on the ground may have changed dramatically. In a fast-moving economy with volatile exchange rates and inflation, stale data is almost as useless as no data.

The Address System That Does Not Exist

One of the most fundamental pieces of data in any modern economy is the address. Where do people live? Where do businesses operate? Where should infrastructure be built? In most developed countries, every building has a unique address that can be located precisely on a map. In Nigeria, the address system is essentially non-functional outside of a few planned areas in major cities.

I live in Lagos. If I want to tell someone where my office is, I cannot simply give them a street number and name. I have to say something like, it is on Admiralty Way, Lekki Phase 1, after the second roundabout, beside the building with the MTN mast, before the yellow gate. 

This is not an address. This is a set of navigation instructions. And if the MTN mast is moved or the yellow gate is painted blue, the directions become useless.

The lack of addresses has enormous consequences. E-commerce companies cannot do efficient last-mile delivery because they cannot locate customers. Emergency services cannot find people in crisis because there is no way to communicate location precisely. 

Utility companies cannot map their infrastructure to customer locations. Insurance companies cannot assess risk by location. The postal system, such as it is, can barely function. The National Identity Management Commission has tried to link identities to addresses, but you cannot link to something that does not exist. 

Several tech companies have tried to solve this problem. What3Words, OkHi, and others have created alternative addressing systems. But adoption is slow because the fundamental problem is for the government to solve. 

Nigerian cities were built without address systems, and retrofitting addresses onto millions of unplanned buildings is an enormous logistical challenge. The NBS cannot do proper household surveys when it cannot systematically locate households. Every data collection exercise becomes an improvisation rather than a systematic process.

The irony is that Nigeria had functional address systems in colonial times and in the early post-independence era. Lagos had street names and house numbers that worked. Kaduna, Enugu, Jos, all had planned areas with proper addresses.

But as cities grew uncontrolled, as informal settlements swallowed planned areas, as new buildings went up without any registration or numbering, the address system collapsed. We had it. We lost it. We have not rebuilt it.

Why Data Matters for Policy

Let me connect this to policy, because some people will read this and think data is an abstract academic concern. It is not. Data is the foundation of every policy decision, and when the data is wrong or missing, the policies built on it are wrong too.

Consider healthcare. The World Health Organisation recommends certain doctor-to-patient ratios, nurse-to-patient ratios, and hospital-bed-to-population ratios. To know if Nigeria meets these ratios, you need to know two things: how many healthcare workers and facilities we have, and how many people we serve. We are uncertain about both numbers. 

The population figure is a guess. So when the government says it is building enough hospitals, based on what? When the WHO says Nigeria is short of 200,000 doctors, based on what? We are making life-and-death decisions about healthcare infrastructure based on estimates of estimates.

Consider education. How many children are out of school in Nigeria? UNICEF says 20 million. The Federal Ministry of Education uses a different figure. State governments provide numbers that often do not add up to the national total. 

Without knowing how many children are out of school, where they are, and why they are not in school, how do you design an intervention? You end up building schools where they are not needed and ignoring areas where they are desperately needed.

Consider security. The Nigerian military and police have been fighting insurgency, banditry, and communal violence across the country. Effective security operations require intelligence, and intelligence requires data. 

Where are the attacks happening? What is the pattern? Who is being displaced? Where are the displaced going? How many people are affected? Without reliable data, security forces are reactive rather than proactive, responding to crises after they happen rather than predicting and preventing them. 

What Other Countries Do Right

It is useful to look at what countries with functioning data systems do differently, not to shame Nigeria but to show that solutions exist. India, with its 1.4 billion people and immense complexity, conducts a census every ten years with remarkable precision. 

The Aadhaar biometric ID system has enrolled over 1.3 billion people, giving India an unprecedented ability to identify and locate its citizens. This data powers everything from welfare distribution to banking to healthcare.

Rwanda, a much smaller country but one that was devastated by genocide just thirty years ago, has built one of the most impressive data systems in Africa. Every citizen has a national ID. Every village has demographic data that is regularly updated. 

The government uses data dashboards to track healthcare outcomes, agricultural production, and economic indicators in near real-time. Rwanda’s GDP per capita is a fraction of Nigeria, so the argument that we cannot afford good data systems is nonsense.

Estonia, with just 1.3 million people, has gone fully digital. Every citizen interaction with the government generates data that is stored securely and used to improve services. Estonians can vote online, file taxes online, access medical records online, and register businesses online. 

The government knows where every citizen lives, what they earn, and what services they use, not for surveillance but for service delivery. Nigeria has 200 times Estonia’s population and infinitely worse data.

The common thread in all these countries is political will. They decided that data was a national priority and they invested accordingly. They created independent statistical agencies with proper funding. They built digital infrastructure. They trained enumerators and analysts. They protected data from political manipulation. 

Nigeria has done none of this. Our data crisis is a choice, not an inevitability.

The Private Sector Is Not Waiting

While the government fumbles, Nigeria’s private sector has been building its own data infrastructure, often out of sheer necessity. Telecom companies probably have the most comprehensive population data in Nigeria. MTN, Airtel, and Glo know where their subscribers are, when they make calls, how much they spend on airtime, and where they travel. 

This data, anonymized and aggregated, could be enormously valuable for planning. Some of it is already being used by researchers and development organisations, but the full potential is untapped.

Fintech companies are also building valuable datasets. Paystack, Flutterwave, Moniepoint, OPay, and others process millions of transactions daily. They know what Nigerians buy, where they buy it, how much they spend, and how payment patterns change over time. This is economic data that the NBS would struggle to collect through traditional surveys. Banks have even more detailed financial data on their customers.

The problem is that all these private sector data exist in silos. There is no framework for aggregating it, anonymising it, and using it for public policy. There is no data-sharing agreement between the government and the private sector. And there are legitimate privacy concerns that need to be addressed. But the data exists. 

Nigeria is not a data-poor country; we are a data-fragmented country. The information is there, scattered across a thousand databases, and nobody is putting it together.

Some startups are trying. Companies building mapping and addressing solutions, agricultural data platforms, health data systems, they are doing valuable work. But without government coordination and a national data strategy, these efforts remain isolated islands of excellence in an ocean of ignorance. Wetin we dey wait for?

A 12-Point Data Agenda for Nigeria

Here is what I believe Nigeria needs to do to solve its data crisis. This is not theoretical. Every one of these steps has been implemented successfully by other developing countries:

1. Conduct a credible, technology-enabled census by 2027: Use biometrics, satellite imagery, and mobile technology. Partner with the UN Population Fund. Make it happen.
2. Fund the NBS properly: The NBS budget should be tripled at minimum. Statistical agencies in peer countries receive far more funding per capita.
3. Create a national digital address system: Every building in Nigeria should have a unique digital address within five years. This is the foundation for everything else.
4. Mandate real-time economic data reporting: Large companies should be required to report key economic data quarterly, as they do in other countries, not through surveys but through automated systems.
5. Build a national data infrastructure:  A secure, interoperable platform where government agencies can share data. Currently, the Central Bank of Nigeria , National Bureau of Statistics, Federal Inland Revenue Service, and other agencies maintain separate databases that do not talk to each other.
6. Depoliticise the census: Admittedly, this might be very difficult considering how our federal system depends on this. However, we need to decouple population numbers from revenue allocation. As long as a higher count means more money, every census will be a political fight, not a statistical exercise.
7. Create a data academy: Train thousands of statisticians, data scientists, and enumerators. Nigeria already produces numerous STEM graduates, they just need specialised training in data collection and analysis.
8. Partner with telcos and fintechs for anonymised data: The data these companies hold, properly anonymised, could revolutionise policy planning. We must create legal frameworks for this partnership.
9. Publish all government data as open data: Every dataset collected with public funds should be publicly accessible. Transparency in data builds trust and enables innovation.
10. Establish data quality standards: Create an independent body that audits government statistics for accuracy and methodology. If the inflation figure is wrong, we should know about it.
11. Integrate traditional and digital data collection: Use satellite imagery to count buildings and estimate population density. Use mobile phone data to track migration patterns. Use transaction data to measure economic activity. Do not rely solely on expensive door-to-door surveys.
12. Make data literacy part of the school curriculum. From secondary school, every Nigerian should understand what data is, why it matters, and how to interpret basic statistics. A data-literate population will demand data-driven governance.

The Cost of Not Knowing

I want to close with a reflection on what it costs us to not know. Every year, the federal government distributes hundreds of billions of naira to states and local governments based on population figures that are at best twenty years old and at worst completely fabricated. 

Some states are receiving more than they should. Others are receiving less. Children in some areas are being shortchanged because their state population was undercounted in 2006. That is not an administrative error. That is injustice.

Every year, donors and development organisations allocate billions of dollars to Nigeria based on data that may not reflect reality. Are they targeting the right populations? Are they funding the right interventions? Are they measuring the right outcomes? 

Without reliable data, nobody knows. The money flows, the programs run, the reports are written, but whether any of it actually works is anyone’s guess.

Every year, entrepreneurs and investors make decisions about where to build businesses, where to locate factories, where to open stores, based on market data that is incomplete at best and fictional at worst. Some businesses succeed despite the bad data. Others fail because of it. 

The economic cost of bad data is enormous but, ironically, unmeasurable because we do not have the data to measure it. 

What gets measured gets managed. What does not get measured gets neglected.

 – Peter Drucker

Nigeria, the giant of Africa, does not know how many of its children go to bed hungry. Does not know how many of its mothers die in childbirth. Does not know how many of its graduates are unemployed. Does not know how much of its GDP is in the informal sector. Does not know how many businesses operate within its borders.

This is not the profile of a giant. This is the profile of a country that has chosen ignorance over knowledge, guesswork over precision, politics over planning. Nigeria does not know where it is. How can we possibly know where we are going?