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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA The Anatomy of a Census Fiasco
By almost all accounts the on-going census exercise has been a fiasco. The Chairman of the National Population Commission, Chief Samu’ila Danko Makama, would probably disagree with this assessment. Last Friday, with one more day to go, he told pressmen that his commission had achieved 70% success in the exercise. However, that he was being overly upbeat was evident from the two-day extension of the exercise he sought from, and was granted by, the authorities.
He himself had acknowledged that there were serious problems in urban areas which constitute anywhere between 30 and 40 percent of the country’s population. By the penultimate day of the census it was improbable that the NPC had achieved 100% success in counting the rural population which is anywhere between 60 and 70 percent of the country. Chances were that, given the vast size of the country – which is all of 923,768 square kilometers – and the difficult terrain in many of its parts, the NPC had counted less than 50% of the rural population by Friday. It is difficult then to see how his claim of 70% success could have been accurate.
If any more evidence was needed that the census exercise has been a fiasco, it came in the shape of President Obasanjo’s second national broadcast on the subject on Saturday. In his first broadcast on Tuesday, March 21, the first day of the exercise, he seemed confident that the exercise would be a success. “I assure all Nigerians,” he said, “that the 2006 population and housing census will be free and fair.” Given the scale of the protests and complaints that has trailed the headcount, it was pretty obvious by the fourth day of the initial five days allotted to the exercise that it was anything but free or fair. Hence the apparent need for the president to make a second broadcast to assure Nigerians that, against all odds, all will be well in the end.
There are several reasons why the current census has been a fiasco. The most important of these is that it has had the most explosive mix of politics and census since the 1963 headcount.
Though the mixing of politics and census is typically regarded as wrong, it is, in a sense, inevitable. Man is said to be a political animal. That means no aspect of his life, including his demography, is completely devoid of politics.
Because there is inevitability in the mixing of politics and census, the problem really is not so much the mix itself but whether it is a good or a bad mix. There is, after all, good politics and bad. Good politics is when you play it by the rules, bad is when you either ignore the rules or try to change them in the middle of the game or even downright undermine them.
The problem with Nigeria’s headcounts is that politicians have always tried to mix census with politics by doing a combination of all three.. When therefore President Obasanjo pleaded in his March 21 broadcast that Census 2006 should not be regarded as a contest for political supremacy, he should have known he was merely being banal. “I wish,” he said, in the broadcast, “to stress once again that census taking is not politics and should therefore not be a contest for political supremacy.”
The truth is census taking is politics and it is therefore a contest for political supremacy. What the president should have stressed then was not the banality that politics and census do not or should not mix, but that the census exercise, and with it the contest for political supremacy, should not be regarded as a do or die affair.
Sadly no one is guiltier of mixing politics and census the wrong way than the president himself. As I tried to show on these pages last week, nothing has raised the stakes in the politics of Nigeria’s headcounts more than the president’s gratuitous politicization of the National Identity Card project some five odd years ago. This was when he made the possession of the National Identity Card a condition for the vote for the last general elections in 2003. In the end he had to eat crow over his insistence, but by then the damage had been done.
One consequence of this gratuitous politicization of the National Identity Card project was the inadequate appropriations for the preparations for the census along with the ill-timed releases of those appropriations. For example, as a result of the too-little-too-late funding of the NPC, there was only one pretest of the instruments of the current census compared to three for that of 1991. Again whereas the trial census for 1991 covered 20% of the enumeration areas, that for the current census covered less than 1% and was not as thorough.
However, important as the negative politicization of the census is a reason for the 2006 census fiasco, it is of course not the only reason. And even here the federal authorities are not alone to blame.
According to Makama, the NPC chairman, 35 million forms were initially released for the headcount. Each form has space for the registration of eight persons. This means the NPC released enough registration forms to take care of 280,000,000 persons.
The last headcount in 1991 put the country’s population at 88,992,220. It is impossible that our population has nearly quadrupled in 15 years. Indeed the population projection for 2005 is 138,468,013. This meant that less than 17,500,000 forms were needed for the 2006 census. Clearly some politicians in the provinces must have hoarded these forms for obviously nefarious objectives.
Hoarding of the forms apart, there was the problem of demarcating the enumeration areas. For the 1991 census when we had 453 local governments, the NPC demarcated 210,000 enumeration areas. Today with less than double the number of local governments – i.e. 774 – the enumeration areas have more than tripled to 665,004; something that was bound to raise the cost of the headcount to absurd levels.
As with the hoarding of the forms it would be unfair to blame the federal authorities for this ridiculous increase in the enumeration areas beyond the argument that the president himself created the political atmosphere for such a perverse and pervasive desire to cheat.
There is also the nonchalance on the part of state and local governments. These could have done a lot to support the NPC and the federal government morally and financially, but they did not. I am, for example, aware that Alhaji Inuwa Yuguda who has been involved in headcounts since 1973 and was a member of the three-man census tribunal for the 1991 census did everything he could to educate the governors of the Northern States about the mistakes their states and others in the rest of the country made in the 1991 census so as to avoid them and help the NPC to get an accurate headcount this time. On many occasion he tried to interest them in cooperating with the NPC in the demarcation of enumeration areas and in the recruitment and training of enumerators, supervisors and coordinators. Only a handful of the governors, particularly those of Benue and Niger States, took him seriously, never mind heeding his advise.
Finally, it would certainly be grossly unfair to blame the federal authorities for the activities of secessionist movements like MASSOB and ethnic militias who took it upon themselves to disrupt the headcounts in many areas in the South-East and South-South.
Then, of course, the National Population Commission itself was not without any blame. First, it was not apparent that it had pursued the local counterpart funding – the United Nations provided 52% of the funds with the rest coming from the home governments - for the headcount with the vigor it deserved. Instead its leadership seemed satisfied to merely grumble about the trickling in of the local funds. Second, media reports of preparations for the census suggested that there was much bickering within the rank and file of the commission about spending the relatively little money that it received for purchasing materials, plant and equipment and for the recruitment and training and the allowances of the enumerators, supervisors, coordinators and facilitators. Inevitably, this bickering led to debilitating strikes by such staff and to their impersonation by crooks. Last by no means the least, the headcount received inadequate publicity compared to the 1991 headcount.
Technically, the current census should have been the best so far. As President Obasanjo said in his first national broadcast on the exercise, it has witnessed at least three innovations in the history of Nigeria’s headcounts. First, there was the Geographical Positioning System for the identification of settlements for the facilitation of the demarcation of enumeration areas. The maps produced by the High Resolution Satellite Imagery in this system will give the lie to any ghost settlement. For example the map for my neighbourhood in Malali, Kaduna, showed all its streets and the exact location of my house and even such details like the round hut and the so-called boys quarters in my compound. It did the same for all the other houses in my neighbourhood.
Second, there was the introduction of machine readable forms like the Optical Mark Recognition and the Intelligent Character Recognition or Optical Character Recognition (OMR/ICR/OCR) forms. The introduction of such forms was meant to ease the collation of results and, along with the third innovation, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), to also drastically reduce incidences of multiple and ghost registrations.
In addition to these three innovations, there was the posting of census commissioners and other senior NPC staff to states other than those of their origin. Such cross-posting should have been done at the stage of demarcating enumeration areas not after, as was the case. Still it was bound to serve as a useful check against manipulation.
Given these checks, the current census should have been our best so far. As President Obasanjo said in his March 21 broadcast, “Today, education, technology and transparency should enhance confidence and faith” in the outcome of the census. Instead, chances are the exercise would meet with widespread rejection.
If it is, clearly, the human factor would be largely responsible. This underscores the fact that the success or efficiency of any system is not so much its checks and balances, important as they are, but how faithfully the people, especially its leadership, are prepared to respect those checks and balances.
Far from building on what good faith the 1991 census had generated, media reports of the preparation for and the conduct of the current census suggest that it was a big step backwards from the achievements of the 1991 census.
In the likely event that it suffers widespread rejection, the authorities would have little choice but to cancel it. If they do, they should aim at conducting the next census in 2011. Hopefully by then we would have learnt the lesson that though the mix between politics and census is inevitable, the mixture does not have to be an explosive one.
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