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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
Nigerian Censuses and their Discontents (II)
When Chief Festus Odimegwu (sorry, I misspelt his surname as Odumegwu last week), the Chairman of the Nigerian Population Commission sacked last October, denounced all the country’s headcounts since the very first one in the Lagos Colony in 1863, not a few of his compatriots from southern Nigeria would have hailed him for having the courage as the country’s first chief census officer to speak “truth” about our censuses – i.e. that it has always been rigged to favour the predominantly Muslim North – to power.
“No census,” he said shortly after assuming office “has been credible in Nigeria since 1863. Even the one conducted in 2006 is not credible.” He then proceeded to predict that the next one in 2016 will be dead on arrival unless our census law is amended.
He did not say what was wrong with the law and how it should be amended but one could hazard a guess that the man was probably in total agreement with the vociferous advocates of including religion and ethnicity in the census questionnaire, if only to settle the contentious issue of the religious and ethnic composition of the country once and for all.
The man may have been sacked mainly because he was insufferably at loggerheads with virtually all his commissioners during his short tenure over policy and budget implementation and administrative procedures, but it must in part have also been because he spoke his mind about the credibility of all our headcounts.
When he said all our past headcounts were rigged in favour of one section of the country – he later modified this view by accusing all sections of the country of also rigging – he merely echoed what to many a southerner must have been the most conclusive evidence to date that all our headcounts so far lack credibility. This evidence was the say-so of one obscure colonial labour officer by the name of Harold Smith.
Smith’s say-so was first carried as a 13-page cover story of the March 7, 2005 edition of Tell under the sensational headline, “How Britain Rigged Elections, Census for the North - Former Colonial Officer.” Ayodele Akinkuotu, the news magazine’s executive editor, prefaced the story with the title “The Evils The British Did”.
Two weeks later the magazine followed with a 10-page sequel on 21st March 2005 in which the transcript of the colonial officer‘s live interview through the internet was published under the banner headline “Exclusive Interview: The British Expected Nigeria to Break Up - Harold Smith, Former Colonial Officer”. This time Dele Omotunde, the magazine’s deputy editor-in-chief, wrote a three-page introduction in which he praised Smith as “A Bureaucrat (who was) an Idealist.”
“The massive power of the North,” Smith said in his interview, “rested on the census figures produced by the British officials in early 1950s. All attempts to confirm those census figures since have proved a failure and this has become the most bitterly contested issue in Nigerian politics.”
According to the colonial officer despite North’s vast land with no humans but cattle the 1952/53 census still gave the region 55 million people instead of 32. The man also claimed that he was instructed by Sir James Robertson, then Governor-General, to rig the 1956 general elections in favour of Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh, the NCNC candidate, because the colonialists disliked Chief Obafemi Awolowo as opposition leader.
If the editors at Tell had only bothered to scratch Smith’s claim beneath the surface they would have realized that the man was talking nonsense. First, the entire population of the country by the 1952/53 headcount was 32 million. Obviously his 55 million allocation to the North by the colonial authorities was a figment of his apparently fertile imagination.
Second, and even more importantly, he was not even in Nigeria in 1953 when the census ended. By his own account in his biography, he first saw an advertisement for a labour office job in Nigeria in 1954, applied, got the job and travelled to Nigeria in 1955 – a clear two years after the last headcount before Independence in 1960.
As for his other claim that he was instructed by the colonial authorities to rig the 1956 elections in favour of the NCNC in Warri, it’s hard to find a more definitive and accurate rebuttal than a 5,957-word rejoinder to the two Tell cover stories by Dr Alkassum Abba, formally of Ahmadu Bello University’s Department of History and now the Vice-Chancellor of Adamawa State University, in Daily Trust of April 22, 2005, among other media.
As Alkassum said, if, as Smith claimed, he was asked to rig the 1956 election in favour of Chief Okotie-Eboh and he rejected the instruction, how come it took four years - in between which he ended his first tour as a labour officer in 1957, went to the UK on a six-month leave and had his contract renewed thereafter - for the Governor-General to threaten him with a reprisal if he revealed his boss’s instructions?
More importantly, as Alkassum said, how come he never published any documentary proof of his weighty allegation in his biography or his website?
A summary of Alkassum’s lengthy piece, “The Rigging of Nigeria’s History,” based on his visit to Smith’s website, interviews with a number of colonial officers and materials on colonial history he had gathered during a year’s (1989-1990) research in the United Kingdom will not do justice to the piece. Anyone interested in finding out the truth about Smith’s claim will need to read the whole article.
One piece of document does, however, speak volumes about Smith’s credibility and I think it bears reproducing as a whole. This was the evidence that clearly shows that far from the colonialists acting in favour of NCNC, they indeed tried to conspire against it because of the way the party under Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe was able to mobilize Nigerians across regions and religions against colonial rule in the early years of the struggle for independence.
“The evidence for
this conspiracy, which had the AG and the NPC, working closely with
the British, against the nationalist forces in the NCNC,” Alkassum
says in his piece, “comes from a top-secret report No. G.221/97, now
available in the Public Records Office in London. The Chief
Secretary to the Nigerian Colonial Government in Lagos, Mr. Ralph
Grey, sent this report to Mr. T. B. Williamson of the Colonial
Office on 31st December 1954. The Chief Secretary reported that:
Smith clearly emerges from Alkassum’s well researched article as an inveterate liar. He lied when he said the colonialists fixed Nigeria’s headcounts in favour of the predominantly Muslim North. He also lied when he said the colonial authorities favoured the NCNC and the NPC against the Action Group.
The widespread belief in the South than the North cannot be more populous than the South is based on the theory that coastal regions the world over are always more populous than their hinterlands. This theory is a fallacy that exposes the geographical and statistical illiteracy of those who espouse it. Arability of land and availability of potable water mainly determine population size. Anyone familiar with the geography of the North knows it has plenty of both, contrary to the popular geographical illiteracy about the 730,885 square meters of the North being mostly desert, compared to the 192, 883 square meters of the South more than half of which is Savannah like most of the North. As for the statistical illiteracy of the theory, it is only someone who does not know his statistics that will equate the higher population density of the South with a smaller population in the North.
If any evidence was needed that the ratio of the country’s roughly 55%:45% population in favour of the North has been fairly accurate, it finally came in the national identity card registration exercise of 2003 under President Olusegun Obasanjo.
How that exercise - along with other demographic factors - provides evidence that our headcounts since 1863 – with the probable exception of the controversial 1963 and 1973 censuses - have been fairly accurate will be the subject of this column in a not too distant future, God willing.
Corrections Last week I said General Yakubu Gowon’s government was overthrown in July 1976 and General Murtala Mohammed who took over from him promptly cancelled the controversial 1973 headcount. General Mohammed took over in July 1975 and, as we all know, was assassinated in a failed coup attempt on February 13, 1976. However, this was not before he had cancelled the headcount. Also in my piece of March 19, I said Lt-Gen Azubuike Ihejirika’s predecessor as army chief was Lt-General Lawal Dambazau. Dambazau’s first name is Abdulrahman not Lawal.The errors are regretted. |