By Folorunso Alagbede, Abuja
Former Vice President and presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in the last general election in the country, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar has said that the claim that the website of the National Bureau of Statistics was hacked into, the very first time in its history, should be of concern to the fidelity of the statistics it releases to the public.
Atiku said this on Thursday in a statement from his Media office in Abuja.
The former Vice President between 1999 and 2023 pointed out that the development, which is coming on the heels of the recent data published on the website of the NBS on Crime Experience and Security Perception Survey (CESPS), underscores the credibility crisis of the current administration.
Subjecting data and statistics such as those harvested, analysed, and released by the NBS to sexing up or political considerations, according to him, is counterproductive.
Atiku maintained that the coincidence of this so-called hack coming only shortly after the release of damning stats on security is suspicious.
“We may be tempted to assume that every stats released by the Bureau is an outcome of a hack”, he said.
According to him, “The unprecedented claim that the website of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has been hacked is an unpleasant development that adds up to the bad tidings that have characterized the President Bola Tinubu administration.
“The development, which is coming on the heels of the recent data published on the website of the NBS on Crime Experience and Security Perception Survey (CESPS), underscores the credibility crisis of the current administration.
“These are strange times in Nigeria, and it is hoped that the situation at hand is not an underhand attempt to pigeonhole the integrity of data majorly used for planning and development and research purposes.
“Subjecting data and statistics such as those harvested, analysed, and released by the NBS to sexing up or political considerations is counterproductive.
“That is why the claim that the website of the National Bureau of Statistics was hacked into, the very first time in its history, should be of concern to the fidelity of the stats it releases to the public.
“Moreover, the coincidence of this so-called hack coming only shortly after the release of damning stats on security is suspicious.
“We may be tempted to assume that every stats released by the Bureau is an outcome of a hack”, he said.
