Reservations trailing the decision by the federal government to conduct a national population census immediately after the 2023 general elections are not unexpected.
This is more so given the history of past censuses marred by intense controversy that robbed off negatively on their overall outcome and acceptance.  With this contentious background, the minimum expectation was that the authorities should have taken measures to eliminate all stumbling blocks to a credible and generally acceptable national headcount.
But this projection appears not to have been properly factored in when the Director-General (DG) of Nigeria Population Commission, NPC Nasir Isa-Kwarra announced after the National Council of State meeting that the exercise will hold a month after the 2023 general elections. Curiously also, the agency intends to hold a pilot census this June after the primaries by political parties. The NPC boss sought to justify the imminence of the census on the ground that extant population data are obsolete projections and estimations with questionable value for planning purposes. It is an open secret that this country has no reliable census data. It is also not in doubt that previous attempts at a reliable census data were dogged by intense controversy, sometimes leading to the rejection of their outcome.
So the issue is not as much with the justification for a reliable national headcount as with its timing. Why the NPC scheduled its pilot scheme after primaries by political parties and the national census after the general elections remains unclear. Is there anything in the conduct of elections that promises to enhance the success and credibility of a national headcount? There is no evidence of that. Rather, the two engagements share common traits in their capacity to divide the country along the line. They are potentially rancorous and explosive.
Being potentially controversial and explosive engagements, there is the mortal risk of effectively managing eventualities arising from their outcome. Ours is a country where elections are synonymous with violence of unimaginable proportions leading to loss of lives and property. In some previous instances, it took considerable time before the crisis escalated by such elections could normalize.
It remains puzzling how a national census that may divide people along the line will fare immediately after usually disputed and rancorous polls. The probable scenario is one that will re-ignite the misgivings and distrusts usually generated by the outcome of such elections. Their combined outcome will likely produce consequences nobody can predict. In effect, having the two incongruous and controversial national assignments close to each other may ignite crisis of proportions that will make a child’s play of extant insecurity in the country.
Even now, many local government areas across the country are inaccessible on accounts of festering insecurity levied by all manner of non-state actors. There are genuine worries on the prospects of elections holding in those communities and local governments if insecurity remains in its current form. It is for the same reason that many well-meaning Nigerians have expressed doubts as to whether the 2023 polls will even hold.
Even if we manage to gamble the elections as INEC has vowed, it will be counterproductive to treat a national headcount similarly. It will make a mess of the entire exercise if people in crisis-torn areas are neither reached nor counted. The suspension of the continuous voters’ registration exercise by INEC in some local government areas should drive home this point most poignantly.
When you add up the potentially disruptive effects of do-or-die elections to the unceasing insecurity that has reduced the worth of human life in this country, one is not left in doubt that the proposed census is ill-timed and ill-advised. It is loaded with frightening prospects for sliding the country closer to the precipice.
The country is currently assailed by existential challenges from all fronts. It is more divided and fragmented than ever before with rising suspicion and mistrust among the constituents. Such misgivings are bound to exacerbate given the high premium the constituents place on the headcount. Things are not remedied by the fact that both revenue sharing and representation in national and state legislatures are based on population.
The two last censuses in 1991 and 2006 did not mark any departure from previous ones as they were equally embroiled in intense disputations as sections sought to gain advantage over others. But while that of 1991 posted a figure of 88.9 million people its 2006 variant came up with 140 million people.
Even then, the unreliability of these figures was brought to the fore by a former chairman of the NPC, Eze Festus Odimegwu. He had told officials of the INEC who approached his agency to officially release some certified data to them to assist in their planned constituency delimitation exercise that there were no officially certified data for all the localities in the country.
Hear him, “the enumeration centres we have, some of them do not exist in reality, some politicians bought them the way you will want to register voters and some people will buy voters’ cards in order to have advantage”. He said those who bought these enumeration areas, raised the figure from about ‘250 to 500 and if you later count and discover that the population is 10, they will say no, but we gave you 500, you have to raise it to that number that we gave you’.
Odimegwu lost his job for coming clear on the monumental fraud past censuses had been. But the issues raised illustrate how desperate our people can go on such issues and a measure of the level of controversy they engender. We can do with less of that crisis now.
Unless there is an agenda that must be executed before this regime exits office, the census should wait for the next government after it has satisfactorily addressed subsisting security challenges.

By: Emeka Omeihe
Omeihe writes for News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).