Population census that may never be

Those who argued that President Muhammadu Buhari’s promise of conducting a credible population census for Nigeria was just one of those impressionist moments that gave many Nigerians a certain kind of masturbatory relief, which, however, achieves nothing, have eventually been proved right. Those like me who believed that our President was serious and meant every word that he threw out as a promise toward conducting a credible census are now asking ourselves what convinced us to believe that indeed he was serious-minded.

For many Nigerians, the census would have ended a 17-year wait for us to have an accurate, or something near accurate, number of the characters that inhabit this space called Nigeria. This means a census for Nigeria in 2023 is already 17 years late.

So, when Buhari promised to conduct one and indeed kick-started the process, many heaved a sigh of relief and argued that Nigeria’s national budgetary process and development planning would now be based on accurate statistical figures generated from the census.

I guess that was why not many people queried the humongous budget of N869 billion to count me and you in an exercise that was to momentarily employ two million enumerators as claimed by the National Population Commission (NPC). The government would have easily taken credit and claimed to have created two million jobs as well. But with his guts failing him, it now means that all officials of the commission, including national commissioners, some of whom were appointed for politically-motivated reasons, will spend the next four years doing nothing like they have done these past 17 years. The further implication of this development is that Nigeria will spend money funding redundancy. But who really cares? Isn’t that how our country is wired?

The last census exercise in Nigeria was conducted by the NPC in 2006. The next one was supposed to be conducted in 2016. It was, however, caught in the North-South politics of mutual suspicion and mistrust over then NPC chairman Festus Odimegwu’s remarks that Nigeria has never had a credible census that showed the appropriate numbers. His promise to make that happen was sacrificed for political expediency by President Goodluck Jonathan, who, as head of state, preferred appeasement rather than results. In appeasing the North and sacrificing Odimegwu, Jonathan imperiled the 2016 census date. And it has remained so to date.

However, in chickening out of the exercise, Buhari pushed the assignment to the next government in the same way and manner that he acted on the issue of subsidy on petrol, which he campaigned with and presented himself as stubbornly fixed on its removal. The sad thing about the postponement is that the commission was already funded for the exercise. It has spent billions of naira on the necessary preliminaries, including a massive public enlightenment campaign and procurement of materials. Some of those are now cleverly wasted funds; wasted by a government notorious for policy inconsistency and one that runs its economy with funds borrowed from international lenders.

Buhari’s action on the census leads to some summations. It was evident that the commission charged with the responsibility was ill-prepared for the assignment. It also points to suppositions that the federal government may suddenly have come to terms with the possibility of the exercise leading to an expose of the actual population of Nigeria. Such exposition would show that the 220 million ascribed to Nigeria, and based on which this government had allocated resources and planned development, may actually be a scam. The outcome may also fault claims of the ethnic and religious composition of the country. Perhaps, this is the reason Dr. Isiaka Yahaya, a member of the publicity committee of the commission, said that the census instrument will not contain questions about ethnicity and religion. The question to ask is why is NPC afraid of establishing the ethnic and religious composition of Nigeria. Isn’t the census Nigeria’s finest opportunity to put questions about the majority and minority status of the component nationalities in the country to rest? Why shy away from answering a question that has dogged Nigeria and worked against its growth? Can Nigeria ever run away from such questions, given the radical growth in ethnic nationalism even within the government?

Besides, the census, as I was told in secondary school, helps in economic planning and the allocation of resources. Without one, and an accurate one at that, it means that resource allocation in Nigeria has been based on assumptions. They have never been backed with accurate statistics. This is why many people argue that Nigeria’s population cannot be more than 200 million. Jonathan put the number at about 150m. He had said, “The census, hopefully, is going to take place soon and I believe it is for the betterment of this country. I don’t believe Nigeria is 200 million. Far from it! We should be about 150 million.”

Several other sources put our number at 220.6 million, with projections that we would reach 233.34 in 2025. World Bank’s 2021 estimate puts our population at 2213.4m. However, when the population assumption of 220.6 million is put against the Independent National Electoral Commission’s data of 93.46 million registered voters, one may begin to think in the same direction as Jonathan. Sadly, an opportunity to establish the fact of our numbers has just been bungled and shifted.

Nigeria’s census problems are accentuated by the fact of the failure of accurate birth and death registrations. This in itself is a problem caused by years of neglect of the development of proper and adequate infrastructure to capture birth statistics as well as migration and death. The statistics that assist in this regard are basically health-related. Good health infrastructure supported by affordable healthcare makes it possible to capture birth data because people are more likely to give birth in hospitals and be properly captured in the database than resort to home delivery and quack birth centres where births are not properly documented. The N869 billion budgeted for the now-shifted 2023 census exercise would go a very long way in improving maternity infrastructure across the country and, as a consequence, improve adequate data on births.