The Statistician-General of the National Bureau of Statistics, Yemi Kale, has warned the former Special Assistant to ex-president Goodluck Jonathan on New Media, Reno Omokri, to keep NBS away from politics.

Mr Kale reacted to Mr Omokri’s tweet on unemployment figures where he berated the President Muhammadu Buhari administration for the high rate of unemployment in the country.

Mr Omokri’s tweet reads: “The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) just released another jobs report showing that in the last 21 months under reviewing, an additional 7.9 million Nigerians became unemployed under Buhari. This is the first government since 1999 that has never reported job gains, only job losses !”

Mr Kale quickly responded to the tweet and tagged it “fake news”. He explained that the figures quoted by Omokri were the figures of third quarter of 2017

“This is fake news. NBS never released any such report. NBS last report was on unemployment for Q3 2017 with the update up to Q2 2018 in progress. Let’s kindly keep NBS away from politics or fake news. We do not support politicisation of data, neither do we respect people that do so,” his tweet read.