Landmark census dogged by old suspicions

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country yet nobody knows exactly how many people live there. A five-day government census launched on Tuesday seeks to end the guessing game. Businesses, schools and offices stayed closed in the commercial capital Lagos and a holiday hush fell over city streets as many residents heeded government pleas to stay home and wait for the census enumerators. Nigeria, the world’s eighth largest oil producer, is a federal republic and central government allocates resources among the states according to population size. Previous headcounts have been mired in controversy and estimates of Nigeria’s population range from 126 million to 150 million people. President Olusegun Obasanjo in a national broadcast on radio and television on Tuesday urged Nigerians to support the census as a necessity for social and economic planning insisting that the "exercise bears no hidden agenda," contrary to widespread suspicions. "I wish to stress once again that census-taking is not politics and should therefore not be a contest for political supremacy," Obasanjo said. "People must therefore desist from misrepresenting the purposes of the exercise for their own selfish interests." The census comes at a tense time in Nigeria, a country prone to ethnic, religious and political upheaval. Already this year has seen scores of people killed in religious violence and an unprecedented number of oil workers have been taken hostage by angry youths demanding a greater share of the oil wealth for their impoverished villages that sit above the crude deposits in the Niger Delta. And preparations for the national count have stoked tensions in some areas. At least five people were killed in weekend clashes in southwestern Ondo state over apprehensions generated by the census, police said, with one ethnic group fearing that the census was a plot to rob them of their land. In northeastern Borno state, nine local councils lashed out against the National Population Commission (NPC) policy of appointing supervisors from outside the state to oversee the exercise in their areas, saying they feared non-native operators would be biased against their communities and not reflect their actual numbers. "We want our own indigenes for the job and failure may mean our people will not cooperate in the head count exercise," said Mustapha Ba'ale of Jere council. The NPC rejected their demand and said police and other security agencies had been alerted to the threat of disruption. In a bid to dispel fears that the census is anything other than a socio-economic planning tool, questions of ethnicity and religion have been left off the census form. Obasanjo in his broadcast expressed confidence the 2006 census will represent a dramatic departure from previous counts by providing accurate and reliable figures. He cited the deployment of new technologies, including satellite imagery and global positioning systems to verify census data. With computer-readable forms being used for the first time to record information in combination with automated finger-print identification, the results are expected to be foolproof, Obasanjo said. But the national media were sceptical. The popular daily The Guardian said that the major problem between "population figures and political appointments, resource distribution and powersharing” remained, as did the worry over "the incentive… for political elements to return to home bases and attempt to boost census figures”.