A Country That Cannot Count Itself

Nigeria marked World Population Day recently under a theme built around young people, “Realising the hopes and aspirations of young people, today and for the future,” and it is hard to think of a country where that theme lands with more weight or more irony.More weight, because Nigerians aged 15 to 29 make up roughly 30 per cent of a population the National Population Commission itself cannot state with confidence. More irony, because a government that speaks fluently about youth investment still governs a country that has not conducted a national census since 2006.

That gap matters more than it sounds. The National Population Commission’s chairman, Dr Aminu Yusuf, said as much at a briefing in Abuja ahead of the commemoration. “We cannot plan for a population we do not accurately count,” he said, calling for a credible, technology-driven Population and Housing Census as “the ultimate tool required to fully map, disaggregate and sustainably deploy resources” for the country’s young people. We agree with him entirely, and we would go further: everything else the Commission announced last week, the youth programmes, the fellowship numbers, the vocational training slots, rests on a population figure that is, by the government’s own admission, an estimate rather than a count.

Officials cited Nigeria’s population as exceeding 242 million in one breath and 238 million in another, a four-million-person gap that would be a rounding error in a country with reliable data and is instead a symptom of a country that has spent two decades governing by guesswork.

None of this is a new complaint. Nigeria has postponed, delayed and politicised its census for years, largely because population figures determine constituency boundaries, revenue allocation formulas and political representation, which makes every region suspicious that a new count will shift power away from it. That suspicion is understandable given the country’s history. It is also no longer an excuse Nigeria can afford. A nation that does not know how many of its citizens are under thirty, where they live, or what they need cannot credibly claim to be building policy around them, no matter how sincerely worded the World Population Day messaging is.

The First Lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, used the occasion to urge Nigerians who have not registered for a National Identity Number to do so, arguing that accurate data underpins effective planning and service delivery. That is sound advice as far as it goes, and NIN registration has genuine value for financial inclusion, security and service delivery.

In our view,  a national identity database, however well run, is not a substitute for a census, and treating it as one lets successive governments avoid the harder and more expensive task of actually counting the population door to door. NIN uptake tells you who has registered. It does not tell you who has not, and in a country with Nigeria’s rural spread and internal displacement from insecurity, that unregistered population is exactly the group most likely to be missed by both the NIN database and every youth programme built on top of it.

The numbers Dr Yusuf did offer, tentative as the base figures may be, describe a youth crisis of real scale. Youth unemployment sits at roughly 33 per cent, with underemployment above 20 per cent, a gap the Commission attributes to educational curricula that no longer match what the labour market actually needs. Nigeria accounts for close to a fifth of the world’s out-of-school children, concentrated heavily in rural and conflict-affected areas where the state’s presence is thinnest to begin with.

Against that scale, the government’s flagship interventions look modest. The 3 Million Technical Talent programme has trained 30,000 fellows nationwide since inception, a fraction of the young people the programme’s own name promises to reach. Vocational training centres have enrolled 150,000 trainees, a meaningful number in isolation but a small one set against a youth population running into the tens of millions. NELFUND’s student loan support is a genuine improvement on the absence of any federal student financing that preceded it, and deserves credit as a first step rather than dismissal as insufficient. But first steps need to be followed by second and third ones, at a pace that matches the size of the problem rather than the pace of a news cycle.

There is a note of encouragement buried in the data too, and this newspaper is not inclined to bury it. Nigeria’s total fertility rate has declined from 5.3 to 4.8 children per woman, a genuine shift with real consequences for household welfare and public service strain over time. But adolescent fertility remains at 15 per cent, which tells its own story about how far reproductive health services still have to reach into the lives of teenage girls, particularly outside the country’s major cities. A declining national average can mask a stubborn rural and adolescent reality, and policymakers who celebrate the average without interrogating the gap underneath it are congratulating themselves prematurely.

Dr Yusuf disclosed that only seven states and the Federal Capital Territory currently have demographic dividend roadmaps in place, which means more than two-thirds of Nigeria’s states are approaching a youth bulge that could either drive the country’s growth or overwhelm its institutions, without so much as a plan on paper.

That is the real measure of how seriously Nigeria has taken its own population, not the speeches delivered every July 11 .The government does not need another commemoration next year to reaffirm its commitment to young people. It needs a national census, conducted honestly and on schedule, and a demographic dividend roadmap in every one of the thirty-six states, backed by funding that matches the scale of the population it claims to be planning for. Until Nigeria can count its own people, every promise made in their name is built on sand.