Federal commissioner representing Edo State in the National Population Commission (NPC), Dr Tony Aiyejina, has said the shift in the 2023 general election by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was the major reason why the agency postponed the 2023 population census.
Aiyejina, who made the disclosure yesterday at an interactive media chat organised by the commission in Benin, the Edo State capital, said while the NPC shifted the date for the census to May, after INEC had shifted the general election, the coming of the rains put paid to the exercise in order to uphold the principle of simultaneity which guides census exercises world over.
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He, however, assured that whenever the exercise comes up, it would not only be accurate, but it would be reliable and auditable, and mark a clear departure from the controversies that trailed the censuses of the past; maintaining that the introduction of the Personal Digital Assistant (PDAs) machines would eliminate all human errors of the past exercises.
Aiyejina, while also dispelling the insinuation in the public domain that the commission had expended the sum of N800 billion before the exercise was postponed, said that contrary to that claim, “NPC had expended N200 billion out of the N800 billion budgeted for the exercise before it was postponed.”
“Let me say this, censuses of the past were riddled with controversies. One thing about the 2023 census is that the immediate past president Muhammadu Buhari did not attempt to teleguide the Commission.
“We opted for digital census, and we introduced the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) which is deliberately configured and can be tracked to monitor field work. This is to ensure that the census will not only be accurate, but it will also be reliable and auditable. But because elections and census in Nigeria have a relationship, we intend to insulate the census from politics.
“We know that a gap of two months or so after the election will suffice. But whatever happened in INEC affected the NPC which had to adjust its timeline from March to May before we ran into a quagmire due to the rain, which made the postponement inevitable. It is not because we did anything wrong or something went wrong”, Aiyejina explained.
While reiterating the importance of census, the Edo NPC Federal Commissioner noted that “census is for future planning and not for the present government. This is why it is important that everything is done to make the figure accurate so that the government can plan well. Government needs accurate statistics to plan with scientific certitude. Nigeria can catch up with the developed countries of the world if we provide accurate census figures for the government to plan.”
Aiyejina stressed that with accurate census, the media could hold the government accountable, just as he allayed the fears that the PDAs could malfunction the way the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) did during the elections and urged Nigerians to be optimistic that the NPC would give the nation the best census ever.
He assured that the postponement notwithstanding, all the sensitive material for the exercise were warehoused at the Benin branch of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), while other materials had been distributed to all the 18 local government areas of the state, where the District Police Officers (DPOs), had kept them safe.
He therefore urged residents of the state to make themselves available anytime the Commission was ready for the exercise, saying “while the apathy in an election can be excused, that cannot be accommodated in a census”, counselling that there would be no need for residents to move to their hometowns during the exercise but should be counted wherever they reside.