Yemi kale, former Nigeria’s Statistician General bags top job at Afreximbank

Yemi Kale, Nigeria’s former Statistician General of the Federation has assumed a new job as the Group Chief Economist and Managing Director, Research & International Cooperation at the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank).

In this new role of his, he would support the bank’s mission of stimulating African trade & industrialisation all centered around promoting economic development on the continent.

Just before his appointment, Kale was the Partner and Chief Economist as well as Head of Research at KPMG West Africa.

A three-time winner of the prestigious BusinessDay Public Service Awards, Kale held significant roles such as the Statistician-General of the Federation and Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics.

Under his tenure, the GDP of Nigeria was recalculated, and following that exercise, it emerged that Nigeria was Africa’s largest economy by GDP. More importantly, periodic publication of economic data from inflation to unemployment, taxes, revenues, and several surveys became a norm, regular and well respected both nationally and globally.

The NBS, under his watch, earned accolades from both Nigerian and foreign observers for his reforms in the data gathering process, which was seen to bring confidence in the final outputs.

The introduction and use of technology also greatly improved the agency’s efficiency, setting trends and standards which the present leadership at NBS is thriving on.

Kale has also worked as an equity analyst at Goldman Sachs and for several years, as a quantitative analyst at Merrill Lynch Financial Services from where he became Group Head of Research and Investment Strategy at Investment Banking and Trust Company Plc. (now Stanbic IBTC Bank plc).

He has held the position of Special Adviser to the Minister of Finance and subsequently, Technical Adviser to the Minister of National Planning before his appointment to Statistician General of the Federation and Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in 2011, becoming the first chief executive of the NBS to be reappointed for a second term.

Kale has also served as the chairman of the National Consultative Committee on Statistics (NCCS) and a member of the Nigerian Economic Management Team (EMT) as well as the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Monetary Policy Committee, National Steering Committee on 2nd Peer Review of Nigeria, the Executive Committee of PARIS 21 of the OECD as well as various Presidential Standing Committees.

He currently chairs the Nigeria Country Office of Accountability Lab and a non- executive director on several other institutions and is also currently a member of the Next Bretton woods think tank group which is a convening forum for rising international economic policymakers, researchers and financial market leaders covering over 20 countries.

He has written widely on fiscal and monetary policy, governance, finance and economic development in Africa.

Yemi Kale holds a B.Sc. in Economics (First class honors) from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. M.Sc. (with distinction) and Ph.D. in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Alumnus of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government leadership in government programs. Fellow of the UK Royal Statistical Society, Fellow of the Nigerian Statistical Association & Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Administrators and Researchers of Nigeria, among others.