Are Nigerians Countable?

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 and 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.

Pressed to speak on the situation the then Federal Minister of Economic Development, Alhaji Waziri Ibrahim (who, many years later in the Second Republic, was to become famous for being an apostle of politics without bitterness) declared: “It is useless to give out any figures to the public under the present circumstances . . . I shall do my duty and if in the end, we cannot arrive at any reasonably accurate figures as the Census Officer has suggested, there can be no alternative but to do the whole thing again.”

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Yes, the census exercise was repeated in the WesternRegion in 1963 but it ended up achieving the dubious distinction of a negotiated result as officials admitted that, “The census figures were arrived at by negotiations rather than by enumeration”.

We have since done other head-counts in 1991 and 2006. Neither of them can be flaunted as statistically reliable figures for planning purposes. So, scoffers of the forthcoming 2023 census are not without justification, except that the call in some quarters for the cancellation of the forthcoming exercise doesn’t make economic or planning sense. The National Population Commission has gone too far in its preparations to beat a retreat; otherwise all the billions already deployed will go down the drain.

Sadly, we have had to depend on multilateral agencies and other global channels to give us their estimates of how many people they think live in Nigeria. They have not made as much mess of the task as we have managed to do, but I wouldn’t for one moment forget that theirs are mere estimates, even if aided by scientific tools.

According to Worldometer, a reference website owned and operated by a data company, Dadax,  which provides counters and real-time statistics for diverse subjects, the current population of Nigeria is 221, 077,036 as at 1.40am on April 1, 2023, based on the website’s elaboration of the latest United Nations data. Nigerians account for 2.64 percent of the total world population and the country currently ranks number 7 in the list of countries by population. The median age  is 18.1 years.

With such an overwhelming number of young people under 20 years, it is not surprising that the younger generation are restive in the midst of our various under-achievements and seeming inability to plan for their future. The need for an accurate census cannot be more urgent than at the present time because if the country is to navigate its way out of the treacherous waters of instability and youth restiveness, adequate human capital development and employment programmes based on verifiable data have to be launched on a massive scale.

Nigeria’s population is projected to reach 400 million by 2050, doubling the current estimate. This represents a demographic nightmare for the country that is already beset with several development challenges. In the next 27 years, Nigeria’s share of the global population would have increased from 2.7% to 4.2%, overtaking Brazil, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the United States to become the third most populous country in the world.

When the population is not harnessed positively, it could be a curse. But when galvanised towards production and development, population could be a force for good. With Nigeria’s vast agricultural potentials and some of the smartest people in the world, Nigerians can (if they shun the usual proclivity to debase, Machiavellian-style, every serious attempt to gather demographic data for planning and development) execute a programme encompassing the use of our huge population to transform our agricultural, mineral and other potentials to generate wealth.

When we play politics with the census, we are sabotaging the future of the country in such a way that it will not have a fighting chance to compete in a world governed by data. Serious countries plan for their unborn generation. They can only do that because they have the data of those currently living within their borders. If you can’t have an accurate census of the living, how do you begin to plan for the unborn?

One of the greatest obstacles against accurate census in Nigeria is the age-long mutual suspicion among the various ethnic nationalities.

There have been arguments about how other countries feature denser populations near the coasts than in desert areas, whereas the opposite is the case in Nigeria where the coastal areas allegedly harbour less population than the arid region. These are questions that can be addressed with love, frankly, and solutions found in an open nationalistic way. People are likely to cooperate with the authorities if they are carried along in the planning in such a way that they are made to realise that census is not a numbers war.

Variants of the game are also played intra-ethnically among sub-groups who want to upstage others in terms of political representation. Nothing short of a comprehensive campaign on attitudinal change is required.

We have to help our people to understand that census enables the government determine the number of taxable adults, which helps to estimate the amount of revenue obtainable through taxes; it also helps to forecast the country’s economic needs in such areas as electricity, housing, food and municipal facilities.  Without accurate census, we would not be able to correctly plan for the employment of the citizens through job creation.

At the rate the world is making technological advancement and raising standards of living, it is going to be difficult for countries that haven’t had the basic discipline to gather relevant developmental data to compete. Already, scientists think that planet Earth has a maximum carrying capacity of 9 billion to 10 billion people. When the crunch comes sometime in the future, certain countable but uncounted persons may become expendable.

According to J. Richard Gott’s formulation of the controversial Doomsday theory, humanity has a 95% probability of being extinct in 7,800,000 years, half of which we have already lived through. But that is even a long shot. What about the here-and-now where our young people are embarking on perilous journeys across the oceans in search of better life — all because we have failed to plan for our burgeoning population? And, how can we plan for a population we have neglected to properly count?

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?