By Charles Pemu 
ABUJA—The Presidency, represented by the Central Results Delivery Coordination Unit (CRDCU), and the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) officially reaffirmed their shared commitment on Wednesday to leveraging data-driven innovations to guide policy formulation and enhance government accountability and transparency across all operations.
Delivering a keynote address at the 2025 African Statistics Day celebration, Hadiza Bala Usman, Special Adviser to the President on Policy and Coordination, emphasized the evolving role of data, which she lauded as having shifted from a mere technical asset to a strategic national resource. She cautioned that without such resources, nations risk deviation from the path toward sustainable development.
Ms. Usman, who leads the CRDCU, stressed that modern, effective governments rely on quality data for critical functions, including resource allocation, while also enabling businesses to assess market opportunities and empowering citizens to hold leaders accountable. She affirmed that the theme of the celebration “Leveraging Innovations in Data and Statistics to Promote a Just, Peaceful, Inclusive and Prosperous Society for Africans’ is highly pertinent to the administration’s focus on placing evidence-based decision-making at the heart of the “Renewed Hope Agenda.”
She acknowledged that technological advancements have concurrently raised citizens’ expectations, prompting demands for greater government accountability. Consequently, she noted, governments must now make faster, fairer, and more defensible decisions, a need that conventional, paper-based survey systems can no longer adequately sustain.
The Special Adviser detailed how integrating innovative data methods yields significant operational benefits. These include using digital data collection to substantially reduce human errors, and employing tools such as satellite imageries and drone mappings to conduct real-time assessments of farmland productivity and monitor environmental changes.
Furthermore, Ms. Usman explained the predictive power of advanced analytics: “Through AI and machine learning, we can now detect complex patterns that help predict disease outbreaks, track inflation, identify poverty hotspots, and cluster communities for targeted interventions. Innovative data gathering now provides the capacity for pro-active governance.”
She praised the NBS for its sustained efforts to modernize data production, analysis, and dissemination, pointing to the strategic alignment between her office and the Bureau that began in early 2024. This partnership, she noted, has strengthened data partnerships, bridged key sectoral data gaps, and ensured that high-quality statistics underpin government performance tracking across the Eight Presidential Priority Areas.
Prince Adeyemi Adeniran, the Statistician-General of the Federation, affirmed that statistics are the “silent architects of development,” warning that navigating governance without credible data is akin to operating “in the dark.”
He confirmed that the NBS is vigorously embracing the digital revolution by deploying tools such as Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) and integrating GIS data into agricultural and environmental statistics. He asserted that these technological advancements are fundamentally about equity and inclusion.
Prince Adeniran highlighted the importance of governance statistics in promoting transparency, noting the Bureau’s active role in the Praia Group on Governance Statistics, a United Nations initiative. He stressed the necessity of disaggregating data by gender, age, disability, and ethnicity to expose inequality and foster true inclusion.