President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday met with the newly constituted Presidential Economic Advisory Council (ECA).
Mr Buhari played host to the ECA when the members of the council visited him at the presidential villa in Abuja.
The body was constituted last month with the mandate to advise the president on matters relating to the economy.
After the gathering, the president accused the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund of publishing inaccurate statistical data about the country.
Buhari also said he has mandated his economic advisory team with the new task of having proper statistics gathering mechanisms.
Both the World Bank and the IMF have in recent times lamented the debt profile of Nigeria in relation to GDP.
The World Poverty Clock also described Nigeria as the World Poverty Capital, a designation rejected by the Buhari administration.
The statistics regarding the high unemployment rate and poverty released by the National Bureau of Statistics which is a government agency, have also been rejected by the Buhari administration.
The statistics regarding the human rights records which was released by Amnesty International have also been rejected by the government.
“We must domesticate our policies to reflect our local realities. While we very much welcome the cooperation and support we are getting from our friends abroad, it is important to make it clear that Nigeria can only truly move forward with homegrown solutions,” the president said in series of tweets Wednesday.
“This must extend to data collection as well. Today, most of the statistics quoted about Nigeria are developed abroad by the World Bank, IMF and other foreign bodies. Some of these statistics are wild estimates that bear little relation to the facts on the ground.
“We can only plan realistically when we have reliable data. As a government we are taking very serious steps to improve the quality of data available for policymaking, and today I charged the Presidential Economic Advisory Council to prioritize the collection of Primary data,” Buhari added.
