The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Professor Tunji Olaopa, has tasked Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) to cultivate the culture of using data to carry out their daily tasks.
Professor Olaopa stated this while receiving a team from the Nigerian Economic Society led by its President, Professor Adeola Adenikinju.
Olaopa harped on the need to do more in building data culture in Nigeria.
“We still have shared responsibility to reinvent some good practices of the good old days in government from the 1960s to the mid-70s. There is ongoing reform effort to re-professionalize the economists and planners/planning cadre in the Federal service.
“The strong professionalism that the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) is bringing to bear on the national statistical system is already reversing the old reductionism where Prof. Wolfgang Stolper dismissed Nigeria as a nation that plans without facts is already happily receding.
“My message to MDAs is that data culture is not about data collection, the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the data we collect. It is about encouraging and indeed making it mandatory for cross-functional teams to use data to inform their daily tasks, and creating data-driven plans, strategies, policies, goals and objectives.
“Which in turn is dependent on the strengths of monitoring and evaluation systems, policy-engaged action and policy research and change management capabilities in government.
“We are determined at the level of the Federal Civil Service Commission, to reinforce this whole dynamic with redoubled drives to beef up the MDAs’ IQ by reinventing meritocracy even in the context of the implementation of the Federal character policy. Of course, we are also working to backstop this with the restoration of competency-based human resource practices in the Federal service”, he added.
Professor Olaopa commended NES for engaging key government agencies, especially the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in important conversations.
He said, “many however still argue that economists have been good at describing what is wrong and explaining what is happening, but less good at generating the evidence base needed to change things. This perhaps being a non-economist’s summation of the transition issues that we are trying to navigate at the moment.”
In his remarks, the President of NES, Professor Adenikinju expressed concerns over the low number of economists at the Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning and the Ministry of Industry Trade and Investment.
He said like the Ministry of Justice, he is not expecting to see more economists than legal practitioners, but Ministries that are in charge of the nation’s economy should have more economists employed to offer advice to the government.
“We are here to look at areas where we can work together. We have observed that even key ministries, like the Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning and the Ministry of Industry Trade and Investment.
“We did a study and found out that the economists in those Ministries and few, these ministries are supposed to be populated by economists. So, we think it is very important that there are some career levels that economists are supposed to occupy”, he said.
Professor Adenikinji said that their members can support the civil service in training civil servants and also conduct research to improve the working standard in the civil service.
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