By Olusegun Adeniyi
In June 2013, then National Population Commission (NPC) chairman, Eze Festus Odimegwu, inadvertently spoke to the architecture of electoral malpractices in Nigeria. Responding to the request for assistance on constituency delimitation exercise by then Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Chairman, Professor Attahiru Jega, Odimegwu said “The enumeration centers we have, some of them do not exist in reality. Some politicians bought them the way you will want to register voters, and some people will buy voter cards in order to have an advantage.” It goes without saying that once the number of enumeration areas is compromised, the integrity of the outcome of such exercise (whether census or election) becomes doubtful.
But the real issue here is not about how our politicians try to ‘rig elections at source’. Rather it is the difficulty in ascertaining the real population of Nigeria without which there can be no proper planning. The United Nations (UN) recommends a national census enumeration for every country at least once every ten years. The last census in Nigeria was conducted 19 years ago in 2006! “I don’t know how long we will keep running away from census, and we keep deceiving and lying to ourselves, by running away from the truth,” former President Olusegun Obasanjo whose administration conducted the last census told the current NPC Chairman, Mr Isa Kwarra, during a courtesy call on him in Abeokuta three years ago.
At a meeting with a delegation from the NPC on Monday, President Bola Tinubu proposed to set up a committee that will solve the logistical problems that hamper the conduct of a new national census. “We must ascertain who we are, how many we are, and how to manage our data,” the president reportedly told his audience, including the Minister of Budget and Economic Planning Atiku Bagudu. “Without an accurate census, we can’t successfully plan for employment, agriculture and food security.”
As much as I agree with the president, he—perhaps more than anyone else—knows quite well that Nigeria has had a chequered history of attempting to count its population. Virtually every effort to conduct a credible national census has ended in controversy, acrimony and rejection by one section of the country or the other. Two (1973 and 1991) were in fact annulled. Perhaps more ironic is that one of the people described as “Confusionists” by Obasanjo for disputing the 2006 Population Census report is Tinubu. Lagos State, according to then Governor Tinubu, had 17,553,924 residents as against the 9,013,534 he claimed was ‘allocated’ by the NPC. “The figure is totally rejected … The database is faulty. It has to be discarded,” Tinubu said at the time.
I once took time to study population figures in several countries. Over the last 100 years, the annual growth rate is mostly between 1 and 3. I then juxtaposed this with that of pre-independence and post-independence Nigeria. In 1911 for instance, our population was 15.9 million but ten years later in 1921, it had become 18.7 million—an increase of 2.8 million. In 1931, the figure had increased by 1.3 million to give us a population of 20 million. Instructively, all these were consistent with the global pattern. The next census took place 21 years later in 1952 by which time our population was 30.3 million people. But from that period, things changed.
With independence and its politics, the 1962 census gave us an extra population of 14.9 million people, thus pushing the threshold to 45.6 million. A year later (when another census was conducted) an extra 10.5 million Nigerians had been added to give us a contentious figure of 55.7 million that was eventually discarded. Ten years later in 1973, another set of 24.1 million Nigerians had come on board to make 79.76 million, although that census figure was also jettisoned. There was no census until 1991 when our population was put at 88.5 million. The census that would follow came in 2006 by which time (within a period of 15 years), another 51.5 million Nigerians had been added to the population data to make 140 million people.
The implication of the foregoing is that between 1911 and 1952, our population grew from 18.7 million to 30.3 million, an increase of 62 percent in 41 years. But between 1952 and 2006, a period of 44 years, the same population grew from 30.3 million to 140 million, an increase of about 360 percent! How can we sustain a system based on such transparent fraud?
Why is a simple ‘headcount’ such a difficult thing to do in Nigeria? I suggest it is because population determines how much each of the 36 states and 774 local government areas collect from the Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF) disbursed monthly by the Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC). Yet, at no other time has a real census been more critical than now to allow for proper national planning. We must wean our nation of the distributive politics of oil rent that is at the root of corruption in our country, including in our politics and data collection.
Indeed, the absence of credible data accounts in large part for the state of our nation today. For instance, in a report on the mismanagement of the oil and gas sector in Nigeria in 2016, the Economist wrote: “…oil is also being stolen at a record rate and traders’ figures show output at well below the government’s figures. Information about Africa’s biggest oil industry is an opaque myriad of numbers. No one knows which ones are accurate; no one knows how much oil Nigeria actually produces. If there were an authoritative figure, the truly horrifying scope of corruption would be exposed.”
The census provides requisite information needed by the government to develop policies that will help run effective public services. We therefore need credible data about our population and the different demographics if we are to successfully tackle the challenges that plague our country. But until we see population counts as an instrument for economic planning rather than for the allocation of rent (unearned resources), census will continue to be a problem in Nigeria. Sadly, with ethnic/sectional cleavages already becoming more and more pronounced two years to the next election, how do we conduct a census which will produce an outcome that is both credible and acceptable in a nation of distrustful people?
The ball is now squarely in President Tinubu’s court!
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