Nigeria: Why Speaker Dogara Is Only Partly Right On 2018 Census

27 April 2017

The recent call by the Speaker of the House of Representatives Yakubu Dogara for the postponement of the planned 2018 national census received mixed reaction from Nigerians. In a statement through his spokesman Turaki Hassan, the Speaker reportedly said: "I won't advise anyone to conduct national census in 2018. I said it before that if we are not going to achieve it in 2017, then we should just forget it until after 2019.

"If you conduct census at the niche of elections, there will be so much pressure, crisis and the lure for people to manipulate the figures for political reasons, such that the agency cannot even cope with.

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