Along the lines of intellectual inquiry and public education my one-time colleague at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) in Lagos, good friend, brilliant scholar and essayist, Dr. Femi Aribisala, wrote about in his Vanguard newspaper article of September 30, 2014, titled: Who Believes the lie that there are more people in the North than in the South; I write this piece. For the subject matter of the population issue in Nigeria – between the North and the South – must be kept on the front burner and attended to with the requisite intellectual rigor it deserves; especially as there is talk of the need for “restructuring” the Nigerian Federation.I, therefore, urge readers of this piece to read it as a companion or as an addendum to Aribisala’s article.
Historically, there were two primary instruments the British bequeathed the then Northern Region, perhaps, as a way of returning the favor for its service as comprador or client-state to the British Crown, during British colonial rule in Nigeria and in the post-independence context: approximately from the mid-to-late 1900s through the end of the Civil War in 1970: (1) Cooked-up numbers of the supposed larger population of Northern Nigeria compared to Southern Nigeria; and (2) Disproportionate control of the State’sultimate instrument of coercion: the military. With those two political instruments, it hardly mattered what system of political governance was created or adopted in Nigeria, the North was assured of gaining the lion share of the “national cake.”
So far, Nigeria has tried three forms of governance: (1) parliamentary democracy (1960 – 1966); (2) military dictatorship (1966 – 1979; 1979 – 1983 (Nigeria’s Second Republic, under the presidency of Alhaji Shehu Shagari, which was overthrown by Major General Muhammadu Buhari);and Buhari’s two-year military regime which was overthrown by General Ibrahim Babangida on August 27, 1985. In 1993, following the political debacle of Chief Moshood Abiola’s electoral victory, Babangida’s inexplicable annulment of the electoral results and Abiola’s mysterious death; Babangida handed over power to an Interim Head of State, Chief Ernest Shonekan, in an ostensible move towards democratization. Two months later, General Sani Abacha, another Northern military brass, ousted Shonekan and installed himself Head of State of Nigeria. His military regime gained the reputation of being the most repressive in the history of Nigeria. Abacha remained in power until his own mysterious death in 1998.
After much fancy footwork, Nigeria’s Third Republic was ushered inand the one-time military Head of State-turned-private-citizen, General Olusegun Obasanjo, who nearly fell victim to Abacha’s homicidal streak, became the compromise candidate—between the military and the people—and hence, the new civilian president of Nigeria’s Third Republic. Obasanjo served as President for two terms (May 29, 1999 – May 29, 2007). Then followed Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s presidency (May 29, 2007, until his death from illness on February 9, 2010). His Vice President, Goodluck Jonathan, took over as President of Nigeria and stayed in office from May 6, 2010 to May 29, 2015. Finally, Muhammadu Buhari won the presidential elections and became Nigeria’s new President: May 29, 2015 to present.
During Nigeria’s First Republic (1960 – 1966), that built-in advantage of presumed greater population in the North,British colonialists bequeathed their then Northern satraps—the Hausa-Fulani aristocracy of the North—worked like a charm in the context of the parliamentary system of government the British saddled Nigeria with as their final “parting gift.” Having rigged Nigeria’s regional population figures to give the North a built-in advantage, by claiming for the North a greater population than the South; Sir Ahmadu Bello and Tafawa Balewa’s political party: the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), was declared winner of the general elections, and since their region of the country supposedly had the highest population in the country; they claimed the largest number of seats in the national legislature, and in alliance with Rt. Honorable Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe’s political party, NCNC, formed the government, with Tafawa Balewa as Prime Minister.
However, one mitigating factor during Nigeria’s First Republic, despite the rigged population figures, was that Nigeria’s national revenues were still derived from non-oil, cash-crop agriculture; and had a triadic structure to it that mirrored its Regional political structure: hides, skins and groundnuts, were derived from the North; and formed the basis of revenues for the administration and development in and of the Northern Region. Cocoaformed the basis of revenues for the administration and development in and of the Western Region. Palm oil and palm kernel oil, formed the basis of revenues for the administration and development in and of the Eastern Region. Of course, there were other traded natural resources: coal and cement in Enugu, tin in Jos, etc; but that cash crop tripod was the mainstay of the Nigerian economy at the time.
Because each Region controlled the production and management of those cash crops, the effect of the rigged national population figures was not as dramatic as it later became, when oil, geographically located in the South-South/South East; became the mainstay of Nigeria’s economy. During Nigeria’s First Republic, individual corruption of politicians as well as the religious intolerance and ethnocentrism of the Premier of the North, Sir Ahmadu Bello, were the most salient issues, although federal budgetary allocations based on presumed regional populations, featured as well. Several scholars and public spokesmen and women voiced their concerns over the rigged population figures, which assigned a larger population to the North.An article published in the Nigerian Observer of December 9, 2014, titled: Population Census in Nigeria, by Foster A. Osagiede Ogboro, effectively reconstructed a historical portrait of Nigeria’s population censuses under British rule, from as far back as 1911 through 1953; and then, in the postcolonial context of 1962 and 1973. In a nutshell, the 1911 census gave Nigeria an estimated total population of 16.6 million, with the North having 8.12 million and the South, 7.94 million. The next census the British carried out in colonial Nigeria was in 1921, which gave the country a total population of 18.72 million; with the North allocated 10 million people and the South 8.16 million people. In 1931, due to the major disturbances that were occurring in Eastern Nigeria, with women protesting being counted, because they thought the head count was intended for taxing them; the British colonial Governor reconstituted the census protocol to exclude the Southern provinces.
Ogboro observed in his article that: “Actual enumeration was then conducted in Lagos, and in five townships, and also in 201 villages in Northern Nigeria. For the majority of the population, estimates of the figures were obtained from existing records. The result of the exercise showed that Nigeria had a total of 19,928, 171 persons made up of 8,493,247 for the Southern Provinces including the colony and 11,434,924, for the Northern provinces. The era between 1911 and 1931 is regarded as population estimation era because population figures were arrived at by sampling or inferential deductions from existing records.” And, as the reader may recall from the foregoing, Eastern Nigeria was excluded from that period’s census calculation; therefore, the “South,” became by default, Western Nigeria. At any rate, that census gave the North a comfortable population figure over the “South”of 2,941,677 people.
The next national census carried out in colonial Nigeria by Britain, was in 1952-53; because WWII, which began in 1939 in Europe and ended in 1945, disrupted British conduct of a census in Nigeria. That 1952-53 census was the last census colonial Britain conductedin Nigeria. The breakdown of the figures of that last British-administered 1952-53 population census in Nigeria, were as follows: Northern Region: 16,840,000 million people (census taken, July, 1952); Western Region: 6,087,000 million people (census taken, December, 1952); and the Eastern Region: 7,218,000 million people; total population for Nigeria as a whole = 30,145,000 million people. If one adds up the stated population figures for the Eastern and Western Regions (7,218,000 + 6,087,000), you would have a total of 13,305,000 million people; a figure which is 3,535,000 million people less than the 16,840,000 million said to be the total population of the Northern Region in 1952-53. This, was colonial Britain’s “parting gift” to the Northern Hausa-Fulani aristocracy that had loyally played second fiddle to the British Crown, without much if any serious agitation for independence as Southern Nigerian nationalists and Pan-Africanists were vigorously doing in the South.
The next population census undertaken in Nigeria, was in 1962, four years before the January 15, 1966 coup.It ascribed an overall population to Nigeria of 45.26 million people, with the South having 23.25 million people and the North having 22.01 million people. Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa’s government rejected the figures on the grounds that Southerners could not be more than Northerners, given that the 1952 census—the one cooked up for the North by “Uncle Jack”—the barely-just-departed British colonialists—assigned the North a higher population figure than the South. Balewa’s government ordered a new census, which, not surprisingly, produced a result that showed Northerners had ostensibly been undercounted by 8.5 million people.Therefore, if you add the 8.5 million allegedly undercounted people in the North, to the North’s originally reported population of 22.01 million, the North was now said to have a total of 30.51 million people, compared to the South’s 23.25 million people; a difference of 7.26 million more people in the North than in the South.
The Eastern and Western Regions disputed the Nigerian Census of 1962, when the Regional population figures were made public in 1963.In fact, the Eastern Region litigated the matter all the way up to the Supreme Court of Nigeria.However, the Supreme Court of Nigeria ruled that it had no jurisdiction over the administrative function of the Federal Government. A ruling, which in retrospect, seems strange on legal grounds, though it may have made political sense for the first ever Nigerian Chief Justice of the Federation Sir Adetokumbo Ademola, who was Chief Justice of Nigeria from 1958 to 1972; the time frame the case challenging Balewa’s new 1963 census figures favoring the North, was brought before the court; to steer clear of that hot potato. All other Chief Justices of Nigeria up till that point in time, had been British: Sir Edwin Speed: 1914-1918; Sir Ralph Combe: 1918-1929; Donald Kingdon: 1929-1946; Sir John Verity: 1946-1954; and Sir Stafford Sutton: 1955-1958.
It is possible that two factors may have played a role in Chief Justice Ademola’s Supreme Court’s copout of claiming lack of jurisdiction over the contentious issue of the 1962-63 in Nigeria? First, it was in the same year of 1963 that Nigeria was proclaimed a Republic, with Rt. Hon. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe its first President. It was also the same year, for the first time since colonial times, the Federal Supreme Court of Nigeria would end sending appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC), a judicial body based in Britain;which,then, made the Supreme Court of Nigeria the highest court of the land.The JCPC was one of the highest judicial bodies in the UK. Established in 1832, it acted in the capacity of the High Court of Appeal for the entire British Empire, other than the UK itself. It consisted of Justices of the Supreme Court of the UK and some senior judges from the then British Commonwealth, known as ‘Privy Councilors.’ The point I am hazarding here, is that the first Nigerian Chief Justice of the new Republic—Nigeria—Sir Adetokumbo Ademola; knowing, as he must have, the political preferences of the British, seeing the victorious investiture of the Northern Prime Minister, Tafawa Balewa, and witnessing the rising tide of political strife and acrimony in the country; may have sort to keep the Supreme Court out of or above the fray by hiding behind lack of jurisdiction.
Still, despite the rejection of the new figures by the political leaders in the South, the Federal Government of Tafawa Balewa accepted them. Nevertheless, another source pointed out: “Indeed, the official 1963 figure of 55.6 million as total national population is inconsistent with the census of a decade earlier because it implies a virtually impossible annual growth rate of 5.8 percent. In addition to likely inflation of the aggregate figure, significant intraregional anomalies emerge from a close comparison of the 1953 and 1963 figures.” (countrystudies.us) The same source concluded that: “Nigeria’s population is about twice the size of that of the next largest country in Africa, Egypt, which had an estimated mid-1989 population of 52 million. Nigeria represents about 20 percent of the total population of sub-Saharan Africa. The population is unevenly distributed, however; a large percentage of the total number live within several hundred kilometers of the coast but population is also dense along the northern river basin areas such as Kano and Sokoto. Population densities, especially in the southwest near Lagos and the rich agricultural regions around Enugu and Owerri, exceed 400 inhabitants per kilometer. None of the neighboring states of West or Central Africa approaches the total level of Nigerian population or the densities found in the areas of greatest concentration in Nigeria. Several of Nigeria’s twenty-one states [at the time] have more people than a number of other countries in West Africa, and some of the Igbo areas of the southeast have the highest rural densities in sub-Saharan Africa. In contrast, other areas of Nigeria are sparsely populated and have apparently remained so for a considerable time. This pattern of population distribution has major implications for the country’s development and has had great impact on the nation’s postindependence history.”
The Nigerian Tribune newspaper of June 9, 2017, in a piece, titled: “Nigeria’s Population Census: A Historical Perspective,” observed that: “Ten years after, in 1973, under the military government of General Yakubu Gowon, the country had another round of population [census] but it also ended in controversy, with the chairman of the census commission and the first Premier of Western Region, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, both calling for the cancellation of the results. The result of that census was never to be published as Gowon was removed from office and the new head of state, the late General Murtala Mohammed, was said to have cancelled the census result outright.” Interestingly, both times census results were rejected or cancelled in Nigeria—in 1962 and in 1973—they were cancelled by Northern leaders: Tafawa Balewa and Murtala Mohammed. One can draw the tentative conclusion that whenever the numbers appear to contradict the politically and economically lucrative fiction of the North’s higher population than the South, Northern leaders block,reject and/or reverse the result.
Given this checkered history of the politics of numbers in Nigeria, in my opinion, the empirical veracity of the claim that Northern Nigeria has a higher population than Southern Nigeria, should bea central issue in the discourse about revisiting the federal structure of Nigeria, in order to have a more equitable distribution of resources and political weight in agenda-setting and decision-making in the national institutions of the country.Having retained and treated the North’s dubious higher population figures as though they are real; every other political system of governance and/or of administration that has been adopted in Nigeria, automatically favored the North. During Nigeria’s First Republic, except for the officer corps of the Nigerian Army, which required a certain level of formal education to make the cut, Northern Nigerians predominated in the rank and file and mid-levelsof the Nigerian Army; which was why the Sarduana of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, did everything he could to fast-track the promotion of Northern army officers to higher ranks, in order to give them controlling dominance in the officer corps of the national army.
The coup of July 28-30, 1966, which was aimed at “ethnically cleansing”the Nigerian Armyof predominantly Igbo officers; became a strategic means of achieving that objective, albeit a brutal and bloody one. The second mechanism that helped achieve that objective was the Nigerian Civil War. Since Nigerian Army officers of Igbo extraction had been “ethnically cleansed” as a result of the massacre of the July 28-30, 1966 so-called “Counter-Coup;” and the mass exodus of Igbos back to the Eastern Region consequent upon two savage pogroms visited on them in the North; and the fact that they were now embroiled in a gruesome civil war with the Federal Government of Nigeria; the Nigerian Army was, more or less, firmly in the hands of the North, regardless of the real and/or theatrical roles played by the likes of Adekunle (a.k.a “Black Scorpion”), Obasanjo, and even, Yakubu Gowon, the ostensible Head of State of Nigeria at the time.
By the time Nigeria became independent in 1960, the British had strengthened the hand of the North in the postcolonial national politics of independent Nigeria, not just politically—through its cooked population figures—but militarily. The two—political and military power—anyhow, form an inseparable synergy. As I noted in my book: A Tale of Two Giants: Chinua Achebe &Wole Soyinka (2016): “In addition to the political shenanigans the British engaged in Nigeria, in an effort to skew political power in favor of the North, the British tried to make sure that military installations in Nigeria, a linchpin to political power; were disproportionately located in the Northern Region; almost as though they were trying to guarantee that if push comes to shove, the North will have an upper hand.” I then quoted Diliorah Chukwurah, who in his captivating book: Last Train to Biafra: Memoirs of a Biafran Child (2014), noted that: “Of all the military installations in Nigeria, there was only one sited in the Eastern Region as opposed to 18 in the rest of the country: 15 in the North, and three in the West.”
With the end of the Civil War and the return of Igbos to the Nigerian fold, the political governance of Nigeria, which had become militarized with the assumption of the leadership of the country by General Aguiyi Ironsi, became virtually institutionalized under Yakubu Gowon. When Gowon was overthrown in 1975, by Murtala Mohammed, another Northern military brass, the military governance of Nigeria continued: Murtala Mohammed’s short lived leadership, Obasanjo’s military regime, the brief period of Shehu Shagari’s democratic presidency—Nigeria’s Second Republic; then, the Buhari coup/regime; then, the Babangida coup/regime; then, the Abacha coup/regime; then, Nigeria’s Third Republic, in which Obasanjo became the compromise “civilian” President of Nigeria. He would serve two terms, then there was Yar ‘adua, then Jonathan, and now Buhari—his civilian second coming.
In the meantime, by the end of the Nigerian Civil War, the spigot of crude oil had begun to flow from the South-South/South East; and the manifest reality of military regime ruled out disputation of military decrees, thus, making it possible for the North, through the instrumentality of its control of the Armed Forces of Nigeria, to dictate, without fear of contradiction, the flow of oil revenues within the country. Moreover, the fictitious population figures, which gave the North a higher population than the South, was used as a built-in mechanism by the North to drawdown on the national treasury; to make the oil-producing states of the South-South/South East, to foot the bill of the North’s profligate ruling aristocracy,fill the bank accounts of their military collaborators, and provide whatever infrastructural developments were put in place in the North. Much of the now realized agricultural potential of the North were financed through such oil revenues. After all, by the late 1970s, going into the early 1980s, Nigeria’s cash crop agriculture had virtually collapsed as a major foreign exchange earner for the country. Where then did the North get the investment capital to make its otherwise arid and semi-arid fields to bloom; to provide imported fertilizers for its farmlands and agricultural extension programs for its farmers;and to build its irrigation systems; which has since turned its geographic part of the country into the ostensible “bread basket” of Nigeria?
Another “shell game” the North has played on the rest of the Federation, as a consequence of the fictitious assumption that it has a larger population than the South, has been the number of states created in that region of the country. Under normal circumstances, a state can be promulgated into being if the demographic conditions on the ground warrant that such an administrative unit, if created, can, at the very least, generate enough internal revenue—through taxation of its residents, royalties from its natural resources and/or local industries—to meet its recurrent administrative expenditures (salaries of its civil servants, provision of municipal services—trash pickup, water supply, etc); even if it requires the help of the Federal Government for major capital development projects. In the Nigerian case, however, the Federal Government controls all the natural resources of the country, and oil revenues, have constituted approximately 90%of the country’s income since the mid-1970s; consequently, the Federal Government doles out constitutionally mandated budgetary allocations to the 36 states of the Federation, regardless of their internal economic viability and/or their fiscal responsibility.
Consequently, it does not matter whether or not an administrative entity designated a “state” in Nigeria, demographically and economicallyqualifies to have such a status conferred on it; all that matters is that on paper, it has received the designation of being a bona fide state and, therefore, is statutorily entitled to budgetary allocations from the Federal Government of Nigeria. Theoretically, it could be a cluster of hamlets, villages and clans, as well as small-to-mid-size towns; they simply get designated a “state,” and that “state” legitimately gets on the Federal Government budgetary dole. It stands to commonsense and reason, then, that in such a system, the politically sensible thing to do is to create as many “states” as possible, even if they are otherwise economically unviable entities on their own. Those “states,” become, in effect, de facto local government areas, but de jure “states” of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
All the 36 states that currently constitute the component parts of the Nigerian Federation, were created by the decreed fiat of Northern military leaders. Except for the self-evident cases, those entities that have been designated “states,” were not statutorily required to prove their political necessity and/or economic viability. Everything depended on the political, ideological or pragmatic preoccupations, preferences and predilections of the ruling Northern military “strongman” of the day!
General Yakubu Gowon created 12 states in 1967, a policy intended to achieve two strategic objectives: (1) Checkmate Colonel Ojukwu’s impending declaration of the Eastern Region an independent state. The purpose being to excise the oil-producing “minority areas” from the Eastern Region, so as to deny Ojukwu the politico-military and economic resources those parts of the Eastern Region would have made available—especially, access to the sea; and (2) To win over the popular support of the Eastern minorities to the Federal side, by providing them with their long-advocated autonomy from purported “Igbo domination.”The same appeal had also been the case in all the other Regions of the country: the “Middle Belt” minorities in the North and the non-Yoruba minorities in the West. However, intended or not, Gowon’s act of state creation, however pragmatic it was in the immediate circumstances, set the ball rolling for yet another mechanism through which the North could passively gain disproportionate and unearned revenue flows from the “national cake;” one that was likely to become quite oily, so to speak,with Nigeria’s Oil Boom—which some have facetiously characterized as: “Oil Doom!”
The next Northern military leader to create additional states in Nigeria was General Murtala Muhammed. He created 7 states in 1976. Next would be General Ibrahim Babangida, who created the largest number of states—13 states between 1987 and 1991—following Gowon’s original 12 states. Between September 23, 1987 and August 27, 1991, Babangida carved out Katsina state out of Kaduna State, and created Akwa Ibom state. Between August 27, 1991 and October, 1996, Babangida created Abia state, divided Gongola state into Adamawa and Taraba states. Bendel was divided into two states: Edo and Delta. Jigawa state was carved out of Kano, and Yobe out of Borno state. Kebbi was carved out from Sokoto state, and Osun state from Oyo state. Babangida created Kogi state and carved out Enugu state from the old Anambra state. Then came General Sani Abacha’s turn: he created 6 states between 1996 and 1998 (Ebonyi, Bayelsa, Nassarawa, Zamfara, Gombe and Ekiti states).
On the face of it, one could argue that: in the geographic South, there are a total of 17 states and in the geographic North a total of 19 states, two states more than in the geographic South. Where, then,lies the great inequity? But here’s the rub. While the difference in the total number of states between the geographic North and the geographic South, is only two; it conceals a clever “shell game:”the disproportionate number of local government areas in the North compared to the South.Those LGAs constitute “legitimate” administrative units which, assuming a much larger population in the North than in the South,are usedby the North to passively claim the lion share of the “national cake.” Of the 774 local government areas (LGAs) in Nigeria, the geographic North has 402 LGAs. The remaining 372 LGAs, are shared between the South West, South East and South-South; collectively making up the geographic South. Yet, all of the foregoing, is predicated on the empirical assumption—which I call fiction—that there are numerically more people in the North than in the South.
The same “shell game” applies also within the context of Nigeria’s current, post-military, democratic dispensation. For example, of a total of 360 members of the Lower House of Nigeria’s Legislature—the House of Representatives—191 are from the geographic North, whereas 169 are from the geographic South.Whether it is from the vantage point of the resources those lawmakers themselves consume, in the form of emoluments and fringe benefits; or in terms of their collective voting power within that legislative body, the North wins by a large number.I admit that I included in the count of the “geographic North,” Kwara, Kogi, Benue and Taraba states, because although they geographically fall below the Niger and the Benue Rivers, they are typically included as part of the so-called Northern “geopolitical zone.”Still, the haunting question remains: are there actually more people in the geographic North than in the geographic South, to justify the number of states and the consequent number of LGAs as well as Members of the House of Representatives from the North?
I still remember many years ago, as a student at the renowned Government College Umuahia, which I had the privilege of attending; I read a geography book written by a distinguished Nigerian geographer by the name: E.F. Ekpenyong, in which he debunked the intuitive presumption that the much larger landmass of Northern Nigeria, is automatically the empiricalbasis for the supposed larger population in the North compared to the South.The argument has often been made by Northern politicians and spokesmen, that it is a matter of simple arithmetic: an inverse ratio between density and sparsity of population in relation to landmass. The North’s larger landmass, though it contains more people than the South, appears to be sparsely populated due to its much larger landmass. The reverse, the argument goes, is the case with the geographic South. Though its population is less than that of the geographic North, its much smallerlandmass gives the false impression of having as many people as in the geographic North, due to the greater density of its population as a consequence of its much smaller landmass.
E.F. Ekpenyong explained, further, that while it is intuitive, and perhaps, logical to assume that greater landmass equals greater population, it is not always, or even, mostly the case, empirically. He explained that a geographic space might be large, but may not necessarily be inhabited by many people, or even, be habitable at all. He used the examples of two deserts—the Sahara (the world’s largest desert) and the Kalahari in southern Africa. Just because they are large landmasses, does not mean they are teeming with human beings;because much of their landmass, though gigantic, are uninhabited, precisely because they are uninhabitable. It may be intuitively as well as factually the case that the North is more populous than the South. However, we should not leave it up to “voodoo arithmetic” or flights of fancy. We should all want to get at the truth in empirical terms. After all, facts are facts: the North is either more populous than the South or it is not.And if, indeed it is, though that seems most doubtful, that settles the matter, at least, as far as I am concerned. If it is not, then redressing the anomaly becomes necessary in the face of such empirical evidence.
Partly as a way of getting to know Nigeria’s ethnic polyglot better, although I am from Enugu state, I did my National Youth Service in Jos. I was first assigned to the Police Staff College in Bukuru, located equidistantly between Vom and Jos; before getting a transfer to the Industrial Training Fund (ITF) located in Jos proper. While serving in Jos, because I was lucky enough to own a car, I used to drive to Zaria from Jos, to visit with friends at Ahmadu Bello University. Interestingly, Zaria is not a big city, in fact, I remember it as a university town rather than as a city; and between Jos and Zaria, and there was only one small town of note on that otherwise desolate stretch of highway: Samanaka.
I also drove to many parts of Northern Nigeria, trying to familiarize myself with its cities, towns and villages. Except for Kano and Kaduna, I found no other “major cities” in the course of my perambulations around the North. Consequently, during my Youth Service in the North, I kept asking myself: where are all the teeming millions of people that are supposedly more in the North than in the South? Though my personal experience was anecdotal, it was nevertheless, quite revealing to me at the time.However, on a more objective and systematic basis, worldatlas.com, on its list of the ten biggest cities in Nigeria, ranked Kano the second largest city in Nigeria, and Kaduna the eight, just above Enugu, which it ranked in ninth place. At least three Western Nigerian cities: Lagos, Ibadan and Ilorin, were ranked first, third and sixth respectively on the same list.
In other words, the worldatlas.com list confirmed my personal experience journeying around the North, given that Kano and Kaduna are the only Northern cities that made the list of the ten biggest cities in Nigeria.Conjunctively, E.F. Ekpenyong explained that countries such as Sudan—when North and South Sudan were still one country—as well as Nigeria’s neighbor to the North—Niger Republic—have much larger landmasses than Nigeria, yet, they do not have as many people as Nigeria does. And that fact naturally begs the question: why would Northern Nigeria, that shares similar geo-climatic topography with countries such as Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Northern Ghana, etc., have so much more people than those geographic parts of West Africa?
In fact, Nigeria ranks fourteenth in terms of landmass on the African continent, although it is the most populous country on the African continent; with countries such Tanzania, Egypt, Mauritania, Angola, Ethiopia, South Africa, Niger Republic, Chad, Libya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Algeria, having considerably more landmass than Nigeria; yet, none of them have anywhere as much population as Nigeria does, despite their much larger land areas. In all the other West African countries, bordering Nigeria and/or bordering each other; their populations in the southern regions of their countries, far outstrip their populations in their northern regions. For example, in Ghana, 70% of its total population live in the southern half of the country. In Mali, more than 90% of the population live in the southern half of the country. The same applies to Niger Republic, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, and so on and so forth. Why would Northern Nigeria be radically different? What are the geo-climatological and socioeconomic factors that makes Northern Nigeria radically different from the rest of the northern regions of West Africa?
Consequently, it should not be automatically assumed that because the landmass of Northern Nigeria is greater than that of the South, it necessarily harbors more people than the South. It is and should be an empirical question, not an attribute accepted intuitivelyor as an article of faith.As part of any restructuring of the Federation of Nigeria, the regional population claim of the Northhaving a greater population than the South must be revisited and empirically determined. And if the geographic North is reluctant or unwilling to have such an empirical verification undertaken, it ought to be the smoke signal that it is aware of the “shell game” I allege, and therefore, that it is aware that the “Emperor has no clothes,” or, at the very least, has no underpants beneath his Baba Riga!
