My good friend and NYSC camp mate Alhaji Garba Isa, from his cosy perch in Jigawa State, forwarded to me this morning an anonymous social media post, apparently directed at members of Northern minority ethnic groups. It said in part, “The National Population Census is coming up soon. Please be wise. Register only English and your tribe as spoken language. E.g. [and it listed about 40 Northern minority languages]. Don’t promote another person’s language, especially HAUSA. If you do, you will be counted as one and by so adding to their population…. Promote your own tribe.”
Well, relax. Tribe and religion have been ousted from the Nigerian census since 1991. A few weeks before that year’s national census was held, then Chairman of the National Population Commission [NPC] Alhaji Shehu Musa, Makaman Nupe, visited Citizen magazine in Kaduna, where I was Assistant Editor. What I heard from him that day was the cleverest explanation I ever heard from a public officer in Nigeria.
Alhaji Shehu explained that the judicial commission that probed the 1973 national census, which General Murtala Mohammed later cancelled, said it was rigged because it lasted one week, giving enough time for rigging. For that reason, NPC under Musa decided to hold the 1991 census in three days.
Now, NPC also did a complete aerial and satellite mapping of the country and divided it into enumeration areas, EAs. Each EA had an estimated 500 households and was to be covered by one enumeration team. NPC then calculated that for an enumeration team to be able to cover the EA in three days, it must spend no more than 15 minutes in each household. And to be able to do that, the number of questions in the questionnaire must be reduced.
NPC then decided that since the census is essentially for socio-economic planning, tribe and religion are not relevant to that purpose. If you are building a primary school for a locality, you only need to know the number of school-age kids there; their tribe and religion are immaterial. Similarly, if you want to build a maternity clinic, all you want to know is the number of women of child-bearing age there; their tribe and religion is immaterial. Thus, the two were eliminated from the questionnaire.
Anyone can see that the two very emotive indices of tribe and religion are the main reasons for rigging census data. NPC never said so; it only hid behind a clever technical explanation. The guy who posted this message urging his kinsmen and women not to help Hausa tribe in the census should please relax. Unless National Population Commission has taken leave of its senses since 1991, it will not return tribe and religion to the census questionnaire, whenever it is held.
