Usually when Nigerians speak about data, they refer to juice on their phones and laptops for internet and other online transactions and activities. But that is different from what the world refers to now as big data.
Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos State raised what social scientists and statisticians have always repeated as a lacking hole in our ability to organise ourselves as a people and nation. And that is the absence of socio-economic data.
The incursion of the coronavirus has brought into sharp focus why we cannot even fight for our lives without such important information.
As a nation, many experts have said we have not enough data on how weak or how strong we are. How much oil we have, how much food per capita we generate, how many people are sick, how many people have diabetes, how many people have doctorate degrees, et al, are such challenges that even some more important information are still elusive. We keep relying on speculations and guessing based on doubtful models of counting and computing.
The most important data regards population. How many people do we have? How many people are born everyday, where they are born, how many die at birth, how many teenagers we have, how many middle age persons, or senior citizens still baffle us. We do not have the right figures of those who eat three meals a day and those who do not, those who live in rural or urban areas, those who die in rural as against urban areas. How many, for instance, live in the slums of Aba, or the Tudun Murtala in Kano?
For over two decades, we bicker for political reasons over whether Lagos State or Kano State is a more populous state, and such primordial obsessions. We have all the infrastructure of counting without the integrity of it, so we count to doubt.
“We need the identity of every citizen in this country. There’s nothing like being over-prepared in this kind of situation. You can make mistakes in times of crisis but you must learn from them,” said Governor Sanwo-Olu.
He was referring to how daunting it is to manage the crisis of this pandemic without data. We went into the coronavirus like a society caught in a state of war pants down. We are without the weapons of war. Not only drugs, or personnel, or even hospitals. We have no effective way of knowing how many people are vulnerable because we have no working formula to do this.
Now we need to know how to track and trace the infected? How much money have we set aside for such an emergency, how many doctors do we have for infected diseases, especially for epidemics and pandemics? How many nurses, how many bed spaces can we volunteer? We have seen that in this society, resilience bubbled onto the surface in the impulse to help the weak by the well-heeled. That is a blessing. It is also in the other parts of the world.
We are already in the throes of the health crisis, and we must battle it. But we have to learn.
“It is what happens to us post-COVID-19 that determines who we are as a people and what we do at the moment. We need data,” said the Lagos State governor.
What this means is that we have to look forward to other kinds of challenges and that requires a society enamoured of numbers. “We have realised as a state, we need data in order to plan and proffer solutions to problems,” he said.
We have challenges in poverty, other health challenges, education and more. If data has become a critical part of tackling COVID-19, data will be key to make any headway into the future.
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