Marché Nouvelles

By Nduka Orjinmo

(Bloomberg) -- Key data on the Nigerian economy remains inaccessible, nearly three weeks after the nation’s statistics agency shut down its website after it had been hacked. 

The National Bureau of Statistics website provides a convenient online portal to key economic gauges for Africa’s top oil producer. The agency closed the site on Dec. 18, while warning against using any information posted on it until it was fully restored.

The lack of access to the website is raising concern ahead of the scheduled publication of December inflation data, due in mid January. The release is an important input for the Central Bank of Nigeria’s first policy meeting for 2025 on Jan. 27-28.

The statistics agency has already failed to publish its report online on capital flows into the Nigerian economy in the third quarter of 2024, as well as an update on outstanding local and foreign debt for the same period. 

The NBS website also houses decades of economic data, all of which are currently unavailable, and its X account that also served as an additional information channel, has not posted since it announced the hack. 

A day before the website was taken down, the statistics agency published its 2024 Crime Experience and Security Perception Survey, which showed that Nigerians paid an estimated 2.3 trillion ($1.5 billion) as ransom in 12 months, and that 65% of households had been affected by kidnapping incidents.

A spokesman for the agency did not respond to requests for comment. 

While details of the attack were not revealed, and there has been no halt in the agency’s operations, economists warn that the website blackout risks derailing access to critical data.

“The delay is giving us a lot of concern, a lot of researchers rely on data from the agency as that one source that is authentic and considered genuine,” said Uchenna Uwaleke, professor of capital markets at Nasarawa State University, Keffi. “There’s a limit to data you can disseminate via press releases.”