The Greek philosophers made a strong case that numbers run the universe, and when you do not make sense of the numbers on anything – business, governance, etc – you are very unlikely to succeed. That takes me to the revelation that fuel consumption in Nigeria has dropped by more than 35% since the government removed the fuel subsidy; the breakdown below…
“In January, it was 62 million litres per day; February, 62 million litres per day; March, 71.4 million litres per day; April, 67.7 million litres per day; May 66.6 million litres per day; June, 49. 5 million litres per day and July, 46.3 million litres per day”.
Good people, the drop is statistically evident that everyone, from the National Bureau of Statistics to the regulators, provided wrong data which was used by the government in its decision making. And within that kind of system, it was all guesswork.
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(Sure, the deviation on data collection could have come due to petrol smuggling within the neigbbouring countries around Nigeria. Yet, that is part of the process since Nigeria also controls the borders, and should have the capacity to measure and evaluate all that.)
No matter how you see this, if Nigeria cannot improve on its statistics, we cannot advance. From actual population to mundane things like how much fuel we consume, we continue to struggle, making it harder for policies to have the intended impacts.
When you run a nation with voodoo statistics like this, it is all guessing because there is no way you can succeed on anything. We all talk about Data as the new oil but one has to refine that new oil. In this case, Nigeria has not built the type of refineries required. That must change and the conclusion is clear: beyond oil refineries, Nigeria needs modern DATA refineries to anchor impactful and actionable policies.
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The previous consumption levels and the latest ones still didn’t reveal anything critical, how do we ascertain whether the recent drop is because of reduction in purchasing power or smuggling activity not being profitable anymore, or both, and if it’s the latter, to what degree per factor?
I think the talk about smuggling was overblown, we simply have no clue about our population and actual consumption patterns. The same way the CBN thought that printing new notes whose worth was less than N500 billion would go round by rationing N20k per day, we have never been a serious people.
We are allergic to numbers, so everyone keeps saying things that are difficult to validate or verify. We closed our eyes and kept paying for what we didn’t know whether were used and by whom, for many years.
If we want to track actual subsidized energy consumption, we can do it, but the moral badness in us is the only impediment.