PEOPLES AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

The Politics of Nigeria’s Head Count

kudugana@yahoo.com

Eight years or so ago, Spectrum Books Ltd, Ibadan, published a little book co-authored by two public relations officers of the National Population Commission (NCP), Isiaka Alada Yahaya and Mannir Ali Dan-Ali, now of the BBC Hausa Service. The book was titled Breaking the Myth: Shehu Musa and the 1991 Census. This title was self-explanatory; Alhaji Shehu Ahmadu Musa, the Makama Nupe, and ever the quintessential civil servant - at the height of his career he was the Secretary to the Federal Government under President Shehu Shagari – had, at long last, shattered the myth that it was impossible to conduct a successful census in Nigeria.

As the authors said “Despite superior statistical techniques, effective administration and increased funding, the quality of census exercises continued to deteriorate, mainly because of the political problems associated with its conduct.” It was, according to them, this deterioration that Shehu Ahmadu Musa, who was appointed the chairman of the National Population Commission April 1988 by military president General Ibrahim Babangida, finally stopped.

The 1991 census has not been without its critics especially with respect to its claim that there were more males than females in Nigeria and its confirmation that the Northern population was higher than the Southern. These criticisms notwithstanding, the 1991 census has been universally acknowledged as the most thorough and the least controversial since independence. Its figures have, in any case, been accepted as the official figures of the country’s population and have been the basis of population projections since then.

If Shehu Musa had conducted at least a relatively successful headcount in 1991, the signs do not look good at all that the current chairman, Mr. Samaila Danko Makama, would be able to match the Makama Nupe’s record, let alone surpass it. And this may hardly be Makama’s fault for, the current chairman, like the Makama Nupe before him, has come to the job with excellent credentials as a civil servant in his native Plateau State and in the Federal Civil Service.

If Samaila Makama fails to repeat the success of the 1991 headcount, politics, that old bug-bear of virtually all our previous headcounts, would be mainly to blame. And, as we shall see presently, President Olusegun Obasanjo himself, would be largely to blame for reintroducing politics into our headcount.

First, however, a brief history of the country’s headcount to give us the historical context of Samaila Makama’s putative difficulties in conducting the forthcoming headcount.

The first headcount in what was to become Nigeria was conducted in Lagos Colony alone in 1866. The next one, also in Lagos Colony, was conducted in 1871. Thereafter census in the colony became a ten yearly affair until 1911 when the exercise was extended to include the Southern Protectorate. The next one in 1921 covered Lagos Colony and both the Southern and Northern Protectorates. This followed the amalgamation of the two protectorates in 1914. The next count was in 1931.

Up to this point, the censuses were mostly by estimates through tax records. Predictably, this association with taxation made people reluctant to come forward and be counted, thus undermining the accuracy of the exercises. Another militating factor was the widespread belief in traditional society that counting one’s off springs was a taboo because it was like an invitation to death.

The next headcount after that of 1931 was to have been in1941. The World War II between 1939 and 1945 made it impossible. After the war, the next census was conducted between 1951 and 1953. It was the most comprehensive but its accuracy was undermined first, by its lack of spontaneity, and second, by the fact that it was the first to be used for the allocation of seats in parliament, preparatory to the country’s inevitable independence from colonial rule. This second factor introduced politics into the headcount.

The first post-independent headcount was in 1962/63.  Not surprisingly it turned into a fiasco. Whereas before the 1953 census, people were reluctant to come forward and be counted, from that of 1963, politicians, if not the people themselves, learnt to rig census figures in favour of their constituencies.

Following the 1963 census fiasco, Chief Michael Okpara, the Premier of Eastern Nigeria rejected it as “worse than useless”. The region went to court but lost out, not on the merit of its case, but on the technicality that the court lacked jurisdiction to hear it.

It was strange however that the East would go to court over the case when it seemed to have been neck-deep in rigging its own figures. The census expert, I. I. Ekanem, in his book, The 1963 Nigerian Census – A critical Appraisal (Ethiope Publishing Corporation, Benin, 1972), quoted the Federal Census Officer as dismissing the headcount in the East and West as distorted. “The figures recorded throughout the greater part of Eastern Nigeria, said the FCO, “are false and have been inflated.”

In the West, he said, “… of the 62 census districts … provisional total figures are available for only five, due, in my view, to weakness in the census organization in the region.”

By comparison there were no adverse reports on the exercise in the North. However, as soon as its political leaders heard that the combined figures for the South was higher than that of their region, they made a supplementary count which added 9 million to their figures. Up to the 1963 exercise, all nation-wide census had given the North a greater population than those of the East and the West combined. The ensuing claims and counterclaims about census rigging led to the cancellation of the 1963 exercise and a reversion to the 1953 figures as a base.

Any hope that lessons had been learnt from the 1963 fiasco and therefore the next one in 1973 would be successful was dashed even before the ink with which the figures were written had dried. Members of the census board, headed by Chief Justice Adetokunbo Ademola, openly disagreed among themselves about the accuracy of the exercise. Many prominent Nigerians, including Chief Obafemi Awolowo, called for its cancellation. Gen Yakubu Gowon dithered about publishing the controversial figures until he was ousted in a coup in 1975 that replaced him with Brigadier Murtala Mohammed. The new Head of State promptly cancelled the census.

Things did not improve either under the civilian administration of President Shehu Shagari that came to power in 1979. He appointed the late Alhaji Abdurrahman Okene as Chairman of the census board in 1981. Other than that his government did pretty little to show it was serious about having a census in 1983. In any case, his ouster in December of that year by the military put paid to whatever remained of his determination to have a census.

This was how matters stood when military president Ibrahim Babangida, brought in the Makama Nupe to conduct the 1991 census, to date the most successful exercise.

The conventional wisdom in the country is that the predominantly Muslim North has dominated the rest of the country since independence for mainly two reasons, namely, its purported stranglehold of the armed forces and its superiority in population over the mainly Christian South. General Obasanjo apparently subscribed to this wisdom for, one of his first acts as the first Southern Christian to be elected as the country’s leader was to purge the armed forces of so-called political soldiers, the greater number of whom happened to be Muslim Northerners. A little over a year after that, he made the possession of a national identity card by adult Nigerians compulsory for exercising their right to vote.

Before this announcement, Afenifere, the apex Yoruba cultural group, had seized upon the issue of the national identity card as the only way to prove its long held cardinal belief that in any proper headcount, the North could never have a bigger population than the East and West combined. The North, said its leader, Chief Abraham Adesanya, made up its population by including its cattle, goats and sheep and other livestock. As this cardinal belief went, the departing colonial masters rigged the population in favour of the North to give its more pliable leaders a permanent hold on power.

If things stopped at Afenifere’s belief, that would probably have caused little worry in the North. But then the late Chief Bola Ige, ever the straight-talking politician, told Nigerians, fresh from his appointment as a member of Obasanjo cabinet, the kitchen cabinet for that matter, that he accepted to serve in a PDP government only because Obasanjo had agreed to implement the Afenifere agenda. The combined effect of Obasanjo’s announcement of the ID card as a pre-requisite for the vote and Ige’s claim was to make Northerners suspicious of an issue which hitherto had been essentially a technical matter.

There seems to be at least two reasons why Afenifere, indeed most Southerners, believe that the population of the North has always been rigged. None of these reasons, however, can stand a second look. First, is the strange notion that the southern half of every country in the world is always more populous than the northern half. A grasp of even elementary geography and demography is enough to expose the falsehood of this notion. Obviously the notion assumes that the further north you move away from the Equator, the smaller the population and the less the fertility of people. The logic of this notion is also that the reverse holds true the further south you move away from the Equator.

If this were true, one would expect the world’s population to be concentrated around the Equator. However, the facts on the ground about the global distribution of the human race speaks otherwise.

Second, there is the argument that because the population density of the south is higher than that of the north, it follows that its overall population is also higher. Again this is not necessarily true. This argument simply ignores the fact that, at 730,885 square meters, the North is more than three times the size of the South at nearly 193,000 square meters. It is, however, not just a matter of size for its own sake. What is important is that more than three quarters of the size is very much hospitable, as shown by a chapter on Nigeria’s population and demography by Profesor Andrew G. Onokerhoraye and another chapter on the flora and fauna of Nigeria by Professor Omotoye Olorode, in the book Atlas of Nigeria published two years ago by the Federal Ministry of Education under Professor Babalola Borishade, with a Preface by Professor Akin L. Mabogunje, a well-respected professor of Geography, and a Foreword by President Obasanjo himself.

When he became president in May 1999, there were expectations that Obasanjo will pick up from where General Babangida left matters in 1991 and organize an even more successful census in 2001. Apparently, his politization of the ID card issue in 2000 made it impossible to conduct any census at all the following year.

However, inspite of the protestations from the North about the ID Card project, the president went through with it in February/March 2003. This, however, was after he was forced more by shortage of time to implement his decision – there were delays in the delivery of the computer hardwares and softwares for the project caused mainly by delays and defaults in payments to the contactors – than by the Northern objection, to drop his insistence on linking the I.D. card to the vote.

To the presumable disappointment of Afenifere and Company, the North still retained its population lead over the South. To put it in the words of a telling story in The Guardian of May 15, 2003 “Disparity here and there, North maintains lead in population”. The provisional figures released by the Ministry of Internal Affairs at the end of the exercise showed that the Department of National Civic Registration in charge of the exercise registered 23,724,645 people in the South as against 28,279,127 in the North. Give or take several hundreds of thousands, these figures were consistent with all previous similar headcounts and voter registration exercises.

With this outcome of the ID Card project, it is tempting to think that the North/South dichotomy over the country’s population has been finally laid to rest, especially as it relates to the adherents of Christianity and Islam, the two main religions in the country. The recent encounter between President Obasanjo and the Northern dominated leadership of the National Supreme Council on Islamic Affairs over the lopsidedness of the composition of the on-going National Political Reform Conference, shows clearly that anyone harbouring such thoughts would merely be entertaining an illusion.

Such thoughts is the more illusory given recent threats by the governors of the South-Eastern States, by Ohaneze, the Igbo apex cultural group, and by the Northern states’ branch of Christian Association of Nigeria, that they will ask their people to boycott the forthcoming census unless it includes religion and ethnicity in its questionnaire.

For reason of space, I shall, God willing, next week examine the merit of the basis of these threats and how they may yet turn the forthcoming headcount into yet another fiasco.