What will Nigeria’s digital census find?

ABIMBOLA ADELAKUN FROM PUNCHPUNCH

Now that Nigeria’s next census date has been officially confirmed, I am curious if the exercise will provide a different picture of our population distribution or merely validate the status quo. Anyone who has been a Nigerian for long enough already knows that the national population is a continuation of the politics of power by another means. Virtually every census in modern Nigeria has been vigorously challenged for its statistical accuracy and, of course, its ideological agenda.

Far more than serving the purposes of efficient national planning—the officially touted reasons for holding them—censuses in underdeveloped societies like ours use purported scientific means to entrench power and allocation of resources. They are susceptible to weaponisation by those who will use their supposedly empirical means to justify undue allocation of resources (and, therefore, cannot but be contentious).

Given that national legislative seats were historically apportioned—and political offices are still handed out—based on perceived demographic distribution, a credible census in these parts is a unicorn sighting. Our political leaders are over-invested in maintaining the official population distribution figures in all their skewed ingloriousness. Like our periodic elections where those whom the odds already favour still rig to pre-empt their opponents’ rigging, census figures are swelled up in anticipation of others cooking them too. By the time everyone steals in order not to be stolen from, we end up with a process that undermines us in every way.

For the May 3 to 5 census though, we have been promised a far more credible process because the counting process will be digital. On its website, the Nigerian Population Commission boasted that the impending digital census “will change how the census is being conducted in Nigeria before now.” Again, if you are a Nigerian, that boast must be familiar. We have seen how far over-valorised digital techniques get us.

As efficient as they can be, technological tools are not magic wands that can be waved over the myriad of Nigeria’s other sociological problems. A mere tool in the hands of humans, technology’s effects are not independent of users’ technical capabilities and ethical judgment. No matter how many dazzling toys of digital technology the NPC has acquired, what will matter at the end of the day is the integrity of the agency.