Are Nigerians countable?

WOLE OLAOYE FROM PREMIUM TIMES

Nigerians are projected to reach 400 million by 2050, doubling the current estimate. This represents a demographic nightmare.

In the midst of our current political jostling, it is indeed easy to take our eyes off other equally compelling imperatives such as the census. But we must not allow ourselves that lethargy. In spite of our chequered history of never having done it right by global standards, can we at least make one yeoman’s effort to successfully log this under our belt for once — or are we truly uncountable?

When I ask if Nigerians are countable, I am by no means suggesting that the citizens of Nigeria have suddenly become too many to be counted, nor am I treating the word, Nigerians, as an uncountable noun such as water or sand. Rather, my question is focussed on whether, given the history of headcount exercises in Nigeria, we can manage to conduct a census exercise that is scientifically verifiable and nationally acceptable.

There were two major tasks on the plate of the Federal Government in the first half of 2023: the recently conducted general elections and the forthcoming headcount. Historically, we have never quite excelled at counting anything, be they votes or people or out-of-school children. Whenever we have had to count anything, we have always followed the mantra, ‘The more, the merrier’ — by which we mean that whatever we were required to count had to be inflated in our favour. That is because we operate a system in which one of the prime parameters for revenue sharing is population.

Our inability to conduct a generally acceptable census is not a post-colonial disease. From 1866 through 1871, 1881 and 1891, attempts were made to count the people living around the Colony of Lagos. The head-counts were limited in scope and did not meet the statistical requirements of the colonialists, who needed the figures for planning purposes. Other attempts in 1901 and 1911 covered a much larger area but were still defective. Then, after the Amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates, regional contestation for numerical strength made the 1921 exercise a battlefield for rigging numbers, the same way votes were rigged.

1931 was not any better. Ten years later, the Second World War was raging and census was the last thing on the minds of Nigeria’s colonial authorities and the fledgling political elite. But between 1951 and 1954, census exercises were held in different parts of the country separately. Each region tried to play the numbers game to upstage the others. One decade later, the same game was still in vogue. The Western Region was under a state of emergency declared by the federal administration and the ensuing turmoil was not conducive for an enumeration exercise.