Nigeria has wrestled over time with having a satisfactory headcount with little success. Censuses held have been dogged with hollow credibility that seemed aggravated with subsequent headcounts and defeated the whole purpose of staging the exercise, namely to get reliable data for planning and governance purposes. Worse, the country hasn’t been able to keep up with the global best practice of conducting headcounts at 10-year intervals. The last time Nigeria conducted a census was in 2006 and her population was put in that exercise at 140.43million, including 71.3million males and 69.0million females.
The country is set for another population and housing census fixed for 3rd to 5th May, this year. Questions have been asked as to why the outgoing Muhammadu Buhari Administration whose tenure expires on 29th May can’t leave the project to the incoming Bola Ahmed Tinubu Administration, but that is by the way here. Trouble with Nigerian censuses hasn’t always been with the integrity of the enumerator body, but also notions associated with headcounts that are extraneous to the objective of headcounts, like the one being plied by proscribed the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) on the impending census.
The National Population Commission had stressed that to ensure a credible outcome, citizens living away from their states of origin should not travel home for the headcount because people are to be enumerated at their places of residence. To discourage such travels, the commission ruled out public holidays during the exercise. “There won’t be public holidays because during public holidays people can move from one place to another, and there may be restrictions on movement based on past experiences,” spokesperson for the commission, Isiaka Yahaya, said in an interview. But IPOB has a different idea. The group urged Igbo people resident outside the Southeast to return home to be counted so to help to ascertain the region’s population size as could strengthen its claim to significance. IPOB’s spokesperson Emma Powerful said in a statement last week: “The mass return of our people during this forthcoming population census will help us quantify the population of Biafrans in Nigeria. Therefore, we must seize the opportunity the Nigerian government is offering to our benefit. They have always told the world that we are a dot with an insignificant population… We must prove them wrong once and for all.”
IPOB and others who think like it must be educated that the objective of censuses is not to ascertain political population, but to gather data on spatial distribution of people in places of their actual domicile for planning purposes. It distorts that data when you travel to where you are not resident just for the headcount. Don’t do it!