Planning without facts?

Ropo Sekoni

THE title of today’s piece is borrowed from an American economist who assisted Nigeria in the writing of its first Development Plan for 1962-1968. The book, Planning without Facts: Lessons in Resource Allocation from Nigeria’s Development, is not fully about Nigeria, but it makes the case that absence of facts vitiates plans and misleads those in charge of policymaking and implementation. It seems that over 50 years after Stopler’s warnings, Nigerian planners—political and professional—are still severely hobbled by lack of critical facts to development and  by lack of right attitude to data mining and storage.

How else is one to interpret the recent revelation that about 32 million under-five children in Nigeria do not have birth registration or birth certificates? If this is true, it means that plans made in respect of education, health, and food production and distribution leave out about 15 per cent of the people, if we put the country’s population at 200 million. What the omission of 32 million children from plans made by the central and subnational governments suggests is lack of faith in facts as one of the fundamentals of modern governance. Extremists would even say that this shows that people in power and governance in the country have no respect for the citizens whose votes bring them power and prominence.

There is no better justification for retrieving this piece from my archive and updating it than a recent announcement by the chairman of the population commission who warned that only its commission under the control of the central government in Abuja has the power to register new births across the federation. This suggests that the obsession over centralism sees no use in the importance of sharing registration of new births and issuance of certificates of birth by the federal and subnational units, especially the local governments into which children are born.

The federal government’s obsessing over territorial control of this important source of vital data for planning ought to have, without prompting from activists for federalism, recognized the urgency of data from registration of births or issuance of birth certificates as crucial to proper governance at all levels. It is befuddling that the population commission feels easy that the representative of Unicef at the event at which the commission re-enacted its monopoly over birth data also announced that “57 percent of children in Nigeria do not have their births registered.”  Instead of boasting about its monopoly of power over issuance of birth certificates that is at less than 50 percent success rate, the population commission opted to flaunt the power that it seems unable to deploy to the benefit of the country.

By way of digression, Nigeria used to have politicians and civil servants who knew the importance of data. There was a story told to me and Mr Dapo Olorunyomi during the NADECO struggle for democracy by Chief Anthony Enahoro, then in exile. The gist of the story was about the importance of data for planning and implementation of the Western Nigeria Free Education Scheme in the 1950s. The topmost civil servant in the country then was Chief Simeon Adebo. He had come to tell Awolowo that enrollment in the schools in border towns around Asaba in Western Region and Onitsha in Eastern region, Ekanmeje (in today’s Kwara) then in Northern Region, and Otte  a border town between Western and Northern Regions was noticeably higher than projected. So were numbers of school children in many other border communities along Ikare-Lokoja Road higher than initially projected. Awolowo as premier was reported to have said that it was risky for the region to deliberately keep its neighbours illiterate in the middle of the 20th century and then called for more data about border villages in the region so that Western Region’s Ministry of Education could plan for such neigbours justifiably as hungry for education as their counterparts in Western Region.  This digression is not designed to preach Awoism; we already have too many current governors from the old Western Region claiming to be Awoists.

The objective of this anecdote is to remind contemporary politicians including federal executive and legislative officers and state governors that data or facts may not be as dangerous or useless as they may seem. Where they are accurate, data help to improve efficiency, transparency, and accountability in governance. It is strange that governors and civil servants in many states are no longer as concerned about data as their parents who served in government in the 1950s were. If they are, they would have disagreed with a central government that gives sole power over birth certificates to one agency with a history of inadequate capacity to collect accurate data on population distribution in the country.

For example, when the virus of ghost workers first broke out in the country, it was in respect of the central government, but now each state government provides its annual or seasonal number of ghost workers in its public service. None of the states feels ashamed to announce in another year the number of ghost workers and pensioners caught in its annual fishing expedition for ghosts in the public service sector. In a culture of deep respect for data or facts, it should not be easy for ghost workers to resurrect every year as they do in Nigeria.

As Nigeria prepares for the post-pandemic new normal, state governors need to embrace the search for accurate data in all aspects of public life within state jurisdiction: number of children born in each local government each day and proper documentation of such births with a photograph of the child’s face. In many countries, each new infant’s picture is taken, fingerprints and footprints are captured and stored for transfer to central government’s data bank and toward requesting a national identification or social security number for the new child whose birth is believed to automatically change the equation. The same respect for data applies to death. Even as people die in response to the pandemic, it is not likely that information about such deaths are available to enable the office of humanitarian affairs revise the number of its monthly beneficiaries. It will not be surprising if most of the people receiving welfare payments do not have any evidence of their birth in Nigeria.

Although the old belief that population figures in Nigeria are hardly agreed upon by the country’s constituent nationalities that are cognizant of the geopolitical significance of population figures persists 60 years after the country’s first official census, this should not discourage governors from collecting accurate data on the people in each of the local governments in his/her state. Embarking on such regular data drive is not necessarily to benchmark with what comes from data collected by census enumerators every ten years, but principally to enable the governor know how many people to plan for in every budget year.

It is puzzling to travel through states carved from old Western Nigeria and see that many streets do not have names and many houses do not have numbers. How can any government—central or subnational—make credible development plan without accurate data? We cannot and should not continue the culture of planning without data that periodic disputes about distribution of population across the country had sparked in the past to continue to make subnational units—states and local governments—hostile to bio and other forms of data needed for effective governance.

Waiting for restructuring and the autonomy it may bring to each state to reconfigure politics and governance at the subnational level should not prevent local government chairmen and governors from accepting the inevitability of data to governance at every level. Nothing in the current centralist constitution prevents governors and local governments from collecting and storing data for use in subnational governance, once they do not use subnational data to poohpooh numbers collected through issuance of birth certificates or counting of heads by the central government.

With more than 32 million young Nigerians unaccounted for in the nation’s records, is it surprising that UNICEF has reported that about half of Nigerians engage in open defecation?  Will anybody be surprised if the promises made by the federal government to improve sanitation across the country in collaboration with the states miscarry after implementation of such plans? 22 of the 36 states are said to be without facilities for registering the birth of those rhetorically and euphemistically referred to as ‘leaders of tomorrow’ by politicians. Is it inconceivable that 50 per cent of the country’s ‘omitted children’ also have another 30 million of mothers and fathers with no birth certificate or birth registration records? Is such a dire situation one that should embolden the population commission to beat its chest as the sole owner of the process of collecting data on new births, instead of looking for creative ways to collaborate with subnational governments to access data needed by all levels of government presumably preoccupied with improving the quality of life of each citizen?