By Adaobi OBIABUNMUO
THE most important things in a democracy involve counting. Among these, three stand out: people, votes, and jobs. These are essential for ensuring that government is accountable; that government is grounded in popular legitimacy; and that government takes the wellbeing of all seriously. Nigeria has been notoriously unreliable in undertaking all three. Unsurprisingly, the country’s democracy suffers a debilitating credibility crisis. It is useful to examine why.
Take jobs, for instance. With the introduction of the revised methodology in April 2023 by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in its Nigeria Labour Force Survey, the unemployment rate saw a sharp decline from 33.3 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2020 to 4.1 per cent in the first quarter of 2023. Since then, the figure has fluctuated 5.0 per cent in the third quarter of 2023; 5.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2024; and 4.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2024.
The reactions from consumers of the report, such as government, citizens, and other stakeholders, have shown remarkable divergence of opinion. For the government, the figures were proof that it was making progress on jobs.
Statistician-General of the Federation, Semiu Adeniran, asserted that the new methodology used by the NBS, which classifies those engaged in part-time work as employed, is consistent with the standards of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and “should have happened much earlier.”
On behalf of organised labour, the Nigerian Labour Congress has described the new numbers “as fiction, stressing that it contradicts reality.” For other stakeholders, the concern is that the government may de-prioritise efforts to tackle unemployment based on these optimistic figures. This highlights the importance of accurate and reliable data, without which a country may either fail to plan effectively or end up planning blindly.
Census figures underpin the task of planning for the provision of public goods, but no one knows how many people there are in Nigeria. The last effort to count Nigerians was in the 2006 census, which resulted in a count of 140,003,542. For planning purposes, we can use this figure and apply the annual population growth rate of 3.2 per cent to arrive at a projected population; or we can rely on an estimated population of over 200 million, a figure produced by the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA).
Successive governments have tried to account for the population of Nigeria through census, but the exercise has been plagued with lack of financial accountability, interference by political actors, alleged manipulation, and inflation of figures. This crisis is as old as the first post-independence census in 1962 that recorded a population of 45.26 million (Northern region 22.01 million, while Western and Eastern regions had 23.25 million) but was cancelled as a result of alleged inflation of figures.
In 2006, during the administration of President Obasanjo, the National Population Commission (NPopC) deployed the Geographical Positioning System (GPS), satellite imagery and Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) in a census which gave us a population of 140,003,542. Nigeria has not conducted a national census since then. However, there have been attempts to update population data through other means like the mop-up exercise, although the commission does not usually make the outcome of this periodic exercise public.
This raises the question of transparency on the part of the NPopC and of the nexus between demography and democracy. How is the government able to plan or allocate resources effectively without credible demographic data? In turn, this raises questions about the resources at the disposal of the data generating institutions in terms of the human and material assets at its disposal as well as the intangible asset of institutional independence. Implicit in these questions is the lingering suspicion of the politicisation of data because politicians always indulge a calculus of political gain from the manipulation of data. When looked closely, there is power, influence and wealth at the centre of the equation, but where does this leave the citizens?
Counting methods may differ depending on who is conducting the count and not just with jobs data. During a press conference in 2019 to mark World Population Day, the then Director-General of the National Population Commission (NPC), a body established, among other things, to undertake the enumeration of Nigeria’s population, Dr. Ghaji Bello, reacted to an earlier report by the UNFPA, which projected the nation’s population at 201 million. According to Dr. Bello, Nigeria’s population was 198 million, adding that “the difference between the UNFPA figure and ours is a question of assumptions.”
In his pioneering work book, Planning Without Facts, Wolfgang Stolper, asserts that ‘one cannot make policy without politics and that politics quite naturally has priority.’ So, what is our priority in Nigeria?
Just as citizens are unclear about the country’s true population, data from the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the body established by the 1999 Constitution to manage elections into various political offices, is also contested.
According to INEC, the 2003 election had the highest voter participation since Nigeria’s return to democracy, with a 69 per cent turnout, meaning 42 million out of 60.8 million registered voters cast their ballots. This was higher than in 1999, when 30.2 million out of 57.9 million registered voters voted. In 2007, the turnout dropped to 57.5 per cent, with 35.3 million voters out of 61.5 million registered. In 2011, 39.4 million votes were cast out of 73.5 million registered voters. By 2015, the numbers declined further to 29.4 million votes out of 67.4 million registered voters. In 2019, although registered voters increased to 84,004,084, only 28.6 million voted. Then in 2023, the register stood at 93,469,008, and 87,209,007 people collected their Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs), yet only 25,286,616 turned out to vote.
Serious questions arise from this data. Despite the massive voter sensitisation and mobilisation efforts by INEC, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), citizens, and other stakeholders, the last general election officially recorded only 28.6 per cent voter turnout. Is this a clear case of voter apathy, unreliable data, or should the integrity of the voter register be interrogated?
Just like the 2023 election where INEC claimed that the introduction of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) would be the game-changer, NPopC also claimed that the 2023 census will be Nigeria’s first digital headcount and would change how census is conducted in Nigeria. The Commission had planned a digital census in 2023, utilising mobile handheld devices, Geographic Information System (GIS), geo-spatial imagery, and electronic forms hosted on Personal Digital Assistant devices. However, the outcome of this effort is not publicly available. Two years later, the NPC Chairman, Nasir Isa Kwarra, in a meeting at the State House on 24 February 2025 with President Tinubu and other stakeholders, discloses that it had acquired 760,000 tablets which it stored with the Central Bank of Nigeria.
Unwittingly, Chairman Nasir Kwarra may have disclosed the dysfunction that ails Nigeria’s ecosystem. It costs a lot of money to acquire 760,000 tablets. The process of procurement for that alone could be guaranteed to make many people rich. As gadgets and digital hardware become increasingly part of the infrastructure of data and demographics in Nigeria, their procurement may be more important than their effective deployment in a country in which contracts mean personal wealth and data has never been seriously governed in public policy making.
To change this, the country may need to address three things. First, politicians as well as the institutions created for that purpose have to take data seriously. Second, it will be essential to take the procurement imperative out of the work of the data institutions. Third, to achieve this, those institutions must be endowed with financial and functional independence. Without the last measure, NPopC may continue in a cycle of habitual motion without movement while the INEC and NBS will continue to gratify fantasy and fiction at the expense of fealty to facts.
Obiabunmuo, is Programmes Manager at the Progressive Impact Organisation for Community Development, PRIMORG
