By John Ikani
Dr Simon Harry has been appointed by President Muhammadu Buhari as the new Statistician-General of the Federation and will also head the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
The new appointment was contained in a statement issued by the special adviser on Media to the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Yunusa Abdullahi.
Harry is to succeed the out-going Statistician-General, Yemi Kale, whose second term tenure of five years expired on August 16.
Harry joined the Federal Office of Statistics as Statistician 11 in 1992 and rose to the position of a substantive Director of Statistics in 2019.
Before his latest appointment, Dr Harry was the Director, Corporate Planning and Technical Coordination Department of NBS with almost three decades of statistical experience.
In the course of his civil service career, he has contributed to several reform initiatives, including the reform of the then Federal Office of Statistics which transformed to the current National Bureau of Statistics, the reform of the Nigerian Statistical System which resulted to the creation and establishment of State Bureaus of Statistics at the sub-national level.
