Henceforth, data analytics will be used to conduct all business activities in Nigerian sea ports..
This follows the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA).
The MoU was signed in Abuja by Mr Yemi Kale, Statistician-General of the Federation and Hadiza Usman, Managing-Director, NPA.
Kale said that the ports were major channels through which cargo entered and exited the country and that they were critical to the development of the transportation and storage sector of the economy.
“Therefore, generating and disseminating more granular information on these activities will be useful in ensuring that policymakers and managers within the sector are fully equipped with the right tools and evidence to do their work. Also, it will further provide a sound basis for operators and potential investors in the sector to make informed decisions on how to participate and take advantage of opportunities available within the sector. The output from this effort will contribute to the growing array of statistics produced by the statistical system in Nigeria and also shed more light on the important work that you do in administering port activities in Nigeria.”
Yemi Kale, Statistician-General of the Federation
On her part, Usman said that the collaboration would result in the development of inter-agency link.
This, she said bridged identifiable gaps by collaborating in streamlining the process of data exchange, gathering, cleansing, analysis, storage, retrieval and dissemination.
“The creation of joint data verification and mechanism in order to have feedback on data and output among the items of collaboration between the two agencies. In addition, I would like to specifically request the collaboration of automation of data collection. This is an area that we would really require support towards automation in our data collection, which would eliminate errors and also have live and up-to-date information when required.”
Hadiza Usman, Managing-Director, NPA
To make this joint plan successful, the deployment of automation as it relates to data gathering is vital.