Josef Omorotionmwan
25 June 2008
opinion
Lagos — Any nation that cannot count its people cannot also plan for their welfare, educational, health, employment and other essential needs. Such a country cannot plan a good election and cannot, therefore, have one.
There is no way such a country can clearly rearrange its political constituencies from time to time as required by law. Neither can it have an equitable resource allocation formula. The government of such a nation would invariably continue to short-change itself because it would continuously lack reasonable data on which to collect its taxes.
To the Western world, it sounds stranger than fiction that a man cannot tell his date of birth. The strangeness is carried further when they hear that there was no birth registry in the man's place at the time he was born. But the truth is that in this our dear native land, Nigeria, most births and deaths are not registered. The only ones that may bear some semblance of any recording are those that take place in hospitals. These ones are in the minority. As we write this piece, thousands are either being born or dying in places in this country where "there are no registries".
Until recently, the road to my home village, Oghada - a distance of some 60 kilometres from Benin City, was terribly bad. Over time, we have become used to the idea of not sentencing our personal vehicles to death by potholes. So, public transport has always come to the rescue. On 15th of May, 2008, that was the mode of transport we opted for on the same journey. We were at the park waiting for more passengers to arrive. With just five passengers to go, a pregnant passenger started complaining of labour pains. We opted to take her to any nearby clinic but she refused. Instead, she asked to be rushed to her village, Oza. We paid for the five passengers and the journey started. There were some experienced women in the vehicle who stayed with the labouring woman at the back.
Behold, by the time we got half way, the woman had delivered. All attempts to check her into some maternity along the way failed because she maintained that she had never delivered in any maternity because of the cost involvement. Only God knows where the women got a razor blade. They cut off the umbilical cord and the journey continued. Anything pre-natal or ante-natal is not for such people. When we got to her 'den' at Oza, it was dancing galore. Who was talking of records; registration or no registration? A baby boy had been born!
Alas! Another confusion had just been introduced into the population equation. Any wonder, then, why all efforts at counting ourselves after our nominal independence in 1960 has always hit the rock? The first attempt was in 1962 and the result was accompanied by so much acrimony that it had to be consigned quickly to the dustbin. Reports of over-counting were recorded from all nooks and crannies of the country.
In 1963, we summoned enough courage to give it another shot. We came out of this with a whopping figure of 55.6 million as the country's population. Juxtaposed against the 1952 figure of 31.6 million, we were faced with an annual growth rate of 5.8 percent which sounded rather ludicrous for humans even where we chose to imitate the flies. Apart from that general outlook, a comparison of the 1952 and 1963 figures in some specific areas like the South Eastern part of the country showed that some local government areas had grown at the rate of more than 13 percent per annum while some other areas indicated a dwarf growth of less than 0.5 percent!
The post civil war effort in 1973 suffered the same fate as its 1962 forerunner - the result had to be cancelled when it openly showed signs of a spiral inflation. In 1991, there was a headcount, which many agreed was grossly "rigged" but since the mass rigging was still less than its forerunners, its figure of 88.9 million had to be tolerated. Nigeria's population has since then been calculated at an annual growth rate of 2.9 percent. That gave us a population of 126 million as at 2003.
Apparently, the Obasanjo administration went into the 2006 Census with some preconceived notion, hence from the very beginning it capitulated to the opposition from our Northern brothers that in order to minimize possible acrimony from the exercise, it must be devoid of religious and ethnic colourations, and the best way to do this would be to exclude religion and ethnicity from the census questionnaire. The administration was perhaps oblivious of the fact that the strength of this argument is also its weakness because to the extent that past censuses included religion and ethnicity, we have now boxed ourselves to the dead-end of having to contend with the biases inherited from those past censuses as far as the issues of religion and ethnicity are concerned.
More importantly, the issue of federal character to which we are all addicted feeds largely on religion and ethnicity. Any attempt to suppress religion and ethnicity, which does not first seek to abrogate the concept of federal character would only give birth to gross injustice and that drives a credibility gap into the entire process.
At that time, we wondered how anybody could solve any problem by running away from it. We posited the argument that the authorities could as well have left out sex on the questionnaire. After all, the general belief at that time was that our population contained more women than men but men have always repressed the same women even with their numerical superiority.
If the results of the 2006 Census so far released are anything to go by, the idea of leaving out religion and ethnicity from the census questionnaire has now been proved totally wrong. Contrary to the previous belief that we had more women than men in our population, the census figures show that we now have 71,709,859 male and 68,293,683 female.
Sad enough, our population census exercises have become over-politicized. It is a crying shame that two years after the completion of the counts, we are still talking about trying to release the final figures. That's the type of climate we have in the political scene. Bless us if we must have tribunals on every issue. The election petitions tribunals just keep sitting unendingly while impostors enjoy their stolen mandates with impunity. We rig elections. We rig censuses. We rig everything. In the end, nothing happens to all those who aided and abated the rigging. The moral message we unwittingly leave with them is that crime pays.
No matter what we do, there is no running away from the inevitable conclusion that a credible census is the very beginning of a successful nation. Credible censuses can only give birth to proper planning and development, including credible elections. All told, we must constantly remember that population is not just a number; it is about people!
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 This Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
