From third term to census fixing

It was no small wonder that a man who spent precious time campaigning for President Olusegun Obasanjo’s ill-fated tenure elongation bid to the detriment of his main work as Managing Director of Nigeria Breweries, should be considered by anyone as fit for appointment to the sensitive job of NPC chairman. This job requires a very […]

It was no small wonder that a man who spent precious time campaigning for President Olusegun Obasanjo’s ill-fated tenure elongation bid to the detriment of his main work as Managing Director of Nigeria Breweries, should be considered by anyone as fit for appointment to the sensitive job of NPC chairman. This job requires a very high degree of civil service experience as well as detachment and level headedness, all of which Mr Odimegwu lacks.
Since he arrived at the helm at NPC from a career record that included accomplished liquor salesmanship but no public service experience of any kind, Odimegwu has been stumbling from one scandalous utterance to another. He said at a public lecture that anyone who fails to get himself counted in the 2016 national census will lose his Nigerian citizenship. The question to ask Mr Odimegwu is, where did he think he derived the power to yank away a man’s citizenship simply because he was missed by census enumerators? The Constitution never said anything of the sort, so it must be a figment of the NPC chairman’s imagination.
Next, Mr. Odimegwu began a campaign to discredit the 2006 national population and housing census that was conducted by his predecessor, Chief Samuila Danko Makama. He said NPC under Makama conducted a biased census, quite clearly meaning that it skewed it in favour of the North. The happy event here was that Mr Odimegwu uttered this statement at the wrongest possible quarters, at the Nigeria offices of the United Nations Population Fund [UNFPA]. This agency, together with the European Union and many Western governments, had provided ample funding and all the technical advice to NPC in the run up to, during and also after the last census. It adjudged it one of the best ever conducted in this country’s history.
Never mind that the UN people must be thinking that Nigeria has hoisted an ignoramus as NPC chair. Who will ever come to the assistance of NPC under this man when it is clear to the UN and other oyinbo that he has made up his own mind as to which part of the country must return the highest population figures or else the census is invalid? Of course Odimegwu has forgotten that President Obasanjo, whom he described as the best thing that ever happened to Nigeria, accepted the 2006 census figures after due deliberation at the Council of State. Odimegwu was busy selling larger beer at the time; how did he reach his own conclusion, short of old-fashioned premeditated tribalist jingoism?
Next, Mr Odimegwu told the Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC] that NPC does not have the data to support its work on constituency delineation because all the enumeration areas used in the 2006 census were done “on a cash and carry basis.” Apparently no one ever told Mr. Odimegwu that complete satellite as well as earth-level maps of the country had been painstakingly done by diligent cartographers since the 1980s, based upon which enumeration areas were demarcated as a general guide for the efficient deployment of census enumerators. No one could “pay” to get an enumeration area because the census enumerator would still count only the people found there, and there were other layers of staff to check this. This man has conclusively proved that he cannot conduct a national census. Unless if it is a census of beer bottles.