When Yemi Cardoso, Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), stated that Nigerians had a poor reading culture, he relied on the readership statistics for the World Bank’s published Nigeria Development Update (NDU).
Of the country’s over 100 million active internet users, less than 0.01% (2,000) of the population read the document, he said.
Cardoso’s speech came on May 13, when the World Bank launched another NDU, a tradition that occurs twice a year.
While Cardoso’s comments focused on the update, FIJ has found that the CBN is not the only agency that receives a low number of visitors who download policy documents.
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Checks on the Budget Office’s website show that not many Nigerians download published government budgets.
On Saturday, FIJ found that the 2025 budget, uploaded by the budget office on March 25, had only been downloaded 5,420 times in five months.
This data does not isolate the number of people who download the document but only logs download times, meaning if visitors downloaded more than once, the number of people who have accessed it would be less than 5,420.
The figure for the 2024 budget uploaded on January 23, 2024, was 25,911 in 19 months and 33,279 for the 2023 budget.
This means 99.9% of Nigeria’s population has yet to see the budgets of the last three years.
When BudgIT, a civil society organisation, published data on the frequency of streetlight projects inserted into the 2025 budget by the National Assembly, there were several misinterpretations, as many mistook frequency for units.
Following the misinformation, FIJ published a fact-check detailing the error, but the budget document still did not receive more attention from Nigerians.
Meanwhile, the problem with policy documents isn’t entirely local. The United Nations (UN) recently decried the poor numbers it was recording.
Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, told member states on August 1 that the numbers were not good enough.
“Many of these reports are not widely read,” he said. “The top 5% of reports are downloaded over 5,500 times, while one in five reports receives fewer than 1,000 downloads. And downloading doesn’t necessarily mean reading.”
That day, the UN published a report on how people were not reading its reports.
While Nigerians’ behaviour towards policy documents is consistent with the world’s, Cardoso’s comments indicate that the country’s version of the norm is a problem.
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