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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
Census 2006 and Its (Potential) Discontents
Two Thursday ago, that is on October 5, President Olusegun Obasanjo chaired a forum in Abuja on the status of this year’s headcount which was conducted for five days from March 21. A cross section of Nigerians and local as well as foreign experts were invited to listen to a briefing by the chairman of the National Population Commission, Chief Samuila Makama, on how far his commission had gone towards releasing the result of the headcount.
The reader will recall that Chief Makama had promised to release the preliminary figures in June, i.e. three months after the exercise. Over seven months on, however, the commission was yet to complete processing the data. At the end of the forum it became obvious that the results will not be released earlier than December.
The delay in releasing the result had worsened fears that there were sinister moves afoot to manipulate the census. Chief Bode George, the seemingly all-powerful Deputy Chairman (South) of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, had helped in no small measure to create these fears.
The reader will recall how, at the well attended December 2005 rally of the Southern Leadership Forum in Enugu, he had assured his audience that the federal authorities will seize the opportunity of the then forthcoming headcount to reverse the long-standing numerical superiority of the North over the South. That superiority, he had told the audience, was a colonial fiction. “We will,” he boasted to the thunderous applause of the audience, “fix it.”
As if to confirm fears that Chief George has proved as good as his words, the Lagos-based PUNCH, ran an editorial on September 6 demanding the immediate release of the census results.
“Therefore,” said the newspaper, “except for the purpose of pleasing the UNFAIR BENEFICIARIES OF PERCEIVELY FLAWED PAST CENSUS FIGURES, WHICH IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE NATION’S INTRIGUING LOPSIDED POLITICAL REPRESENTATION… there is no reason for any further delay in the release of the 2006 census result”. (Emphasis mine).
Not to leave anyone in doubt as to who the “unfair beneficiaries” are of past census figures, PUNCH went on to talk about some sections of the country that, it said, carried a “ferocious campaign … to have religion and ethnicity removed from the census statistics (as) part of the initial plot to sabotage the headcount.” It did not name names but it was pretty obvious that PUNCH meant the predominantly Muslim North.
The newspaper then concluded, contrary to several of its own reports about the census exercise in March, that “Now that the exercise has been successfully carried out and the NPC insists it was transparent and conducted in line with the best international standards, the results should be released immediately.”
This year’s census may indeed break the jinx that our headcounts have suffered since time immemorial, but it certainly would not be because the NPC insists it was transparent and met the highest standards. It is patently absurd to imagine that a cook will admit that his cooking is awful, even if it is. The test of the commission’s success therefore cannot be its self-assessment or, for that matter, its assessment by the federal authorities. Such success can only come from the public’s perception of its handling of the headcount. It was this concern with the public perception that its conduct of the exercise, at least initially, has been less than satisfactory and may lead to an even more unsatisfactory result that may have prompted the authorities to organize the census forum in question
Both President Obasanjo and the NPC Chairman, Chief Makama, sought to assure the audience and Nigerians, to whom the event was telecast live, that no one had any plans whatsoever to manipulate the census result. The two told Nigerians categorically and solemnly that as at the time of the forum they had absolutely no knowledge of what even the preliminary figures were. In his over one hour briefing of the audience, the NPC chairman listed the meticulous steps the NPC took to make sure that the exercise produced a credible outcome. These included the use of high technology in delineating enumeration areas and in capturing data, the use of census experts, both local and foreign, to help in the exercise and the cross-posting of census commissioners and other senior staff to states and geo-political zones other than their own.
All these measures - and more - should give us a credible census. The problem, however, is that most Nigerians have so much made up their minds about the outcome that hardly anything anyone does would convince them that any thing to the contrary was not the result of a sinister manipulation of the figures.
After all, virtually all the steps the NPC took in conducting the March exercise were also taken in the 1991 census. Yet these did not stop some sections of the country from rejecting the headcount.
Indeed in terms of preparation the 1991 census was much more thorough than this year’s. The releases of funds were adequate and timely, unlike with the March census which had to be postponed twice because of inadequate funding initially.
For example, as a result of the initial federal niggardliness, whereas in 1991 there were three census pretests, there was only one for the March census. Again, whereas the 1991 census trial covered 20% of the enumeration areas that of this year covered less than 1%.
So the problem of our census, as with so many other issues, is not really that of check and balances. I also believe it is also not necessarily those of the integrity and competence of those put in charge. The problem is essentially one of the good faith of those in over-all authority and of a very vocal Southern media and its political class which are not prepared to let fact and logic get in the way of their beliefs that the North is barren land and cannot therefore have more population than the South.
In his first broadcast on Census 2006 on March 21, President Obasanjo cautioned Nigerians against reading politics into the exercise. “Census taking” he said, among other things, “is not politics and should therefore not be a contest for political supremacy.” Yet no leader in the Nigeria’s history has politicized census like the president himself. It was him who, for the first time in the history of this country, tried to make the vote conditional upon having a national identity card in a registration exercise conducted four years ago that was clearly meant to prove that there were more Nigerians in the South than in the North.
For the southern media and its political class, the reservations of its Northern counterparts about the I.D. card project was sufficient evidence that the region’s numerical superiority over the South was, as Chief Bode George put it, a colonial fiction. Yet the results of the exercise suggested an even wider gap in the country’s population distribution in favour of the North than were shown in previous headcounts.
The 1991 census gave the region a population of 47,369,237, roughly 53.23% of Nigeria’s population of 88,992,220, as against 46.77% for the South. This was consistent with most headcounts in Nigeria since 1911. The voters’ register for the 2003 elections also came up with similar percentages; the North had 33,374,762 voters out of a total of 60,823,022. The I.D. card exercise gave the North 28,419,135 Nigerians above 18, roughly 54.50% of all adult Nigerians as against 45.50% for the South.
Not surprisingly the result of the I.D. card project was greeted by a deafening silence from the Southern media and its political class, a silence clearly dictated by the fact that they could not reject the result without looking ridiculous. After all it was they who insisted on it come hell, come high-water. Second, it was conducted at a time the president, the supervising minister of internal affairs and the head of the department of civic registration were not only from the South but were all from the South-West.
Clearly if the I.D. card project could not end the debate about the country’s demographic structure, it is difficult to see what else would. One thing that could is an acceptance by the South that the North, far from being a barren desert, is one of the most habitable expansive pieces of lands in Africa. Another is overcoming the demographic illiteracy that a more urban and more densely populated area is necessarily more populous than a more rural and sparser area. As one demographic expert once pointed out, if this were so, the United States would have been more populous than China or India.
As Professor Jeffrey Sachs, formerly of Harvard and lately of Columbia University, said in his 2005 book, The End of Poverty, a book he wrote after consulting for the United Nations on its Millennium Project, “Much of Africa’s population lives in the interior of the continent rather than at the coast”. As long as some sections of the country choose to ignore this simple fact of Africa’s demography, there will never be an end to the controversy over Nigeria’s census
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