We must plan to have credible, indisputable census
Ndubisi Ifeanyi Nwokoma, a Professor of Economics and former Director, Centre for Economic Policy Analysis and Research, at the University of Lagos, in this interview with Weekend Trust notes that while it is important to have a census to aid planning and deployment of resources, efforts must be made to have a credible exercise which […]
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Ndubisi Ifeanyi Nwokoma, a Professor of Economics and former Director, Centre for Economic Policy Analysis and Research, at the University of Lagos, in this interview with Weekend Trust notes that while it is important to have a census to aid planning and deployment of resources, efforts must be made to have a credible exercise which will not be disputed.
The United Nations stipulates that countries must conduct a census every 10 years but almost two decades now, Nigeria is still dilly-dallying on the exercise. What is the implication of this?
Your guess is as good as mine. The need for information to plan the economy is very critical. Actually, what we are having now is just guess work. We are doing estimation and projection concerning the population of the country. And if you ask me, I don’t think Nigeria is as populated as being indicated because some of the figures in the past are actually suspect and there are stakeholders across the country who feel that the figures may not reflect reality. A number of times, the concept of nationhood has not dawned on us for us to plan as a nation.
We are now planning as various segments of that nation; like the ordinary man would say, ‘the push me, I push you’ kind of planning. So, there are regional and ethnic interests when it comes to population because population has been used as a yardstick for distribution of resources in some respect, revenue allocation, resource control and all of that.
Population is a sensitive issue. A number of times, we don’t really get what ought to be the accurate figure because they are subject to manipulation. My take here is not on the need to have a population census, that is not my major concern. My major concern is the credibility of the figures which over the years have always been an issue.
Even if we don’t do it this year, we will do it next year, let us plan for a credible census programme. If we don’t, we would just be going round and walking through the motion and saying ‘we are doing census’ but people doubt the credibility.
There was a time the population of Lagos was about 9 million and the Lagos State Government did their own and saw about 21 million. So, you can see the differential because there was a lack of confidence. The federal figure was much lower than the figure the state government released.
So, my concern is not on having a census or not having a census, my concern is on the credibility of the figures because even if we have a census every year and the figures are not correct, it is as good as not having one. Basically, we need to put in place structures and systems to make sure that there would be a high level of confidence in the figures whenever the figures are released and that is what we need for planning.
In terms of ensuring credibility, what other things do we need to put in place to make the census credible when we want to do it?
We need to deploy technology. It will be a very useful factor in getting credibility and then we need to put checks and balances in the system so that even if one segment of the planning process is compromised, at the other side where you have checks and balances, it would be detected that something is wrong somewhere concerning the figures. So, there should be adequate checks and balances for quality assurance and we should make sure le to confirm and ratify whatever figure comes out of the process or else we would just do the census and the figures would come out but it will actually have no value for planning and any other thing.
What is the implication of the delay in conducting the census exercise?
To me, there is no implication. If the figures are not correct, what would it do? If we have the census and the figures are not correct, what values will that bring? If you plan with those fake figures, you cannot get the desired result. It is just like when 10 people are poor and actually it is 15 who are poor and you now begin to plan for 10 people, definitely there would be some problem in the system.
So, if we don’t have credibility, whether we have it every five years or 10 years or whatever, it’s as if we have not had it because what is coming out is not something you can depend on.
A society is as strong as this credibility. Look at the American election, they did it and even the Democrats, everybody accepted the result. It might not be 100 per cent perfect but there seems to be some measure of credibility. That is how you can grow a nation. The day people begin to have confidence in the process when it comes to counting, whether counting votes or counting number of human beings and so on, we cannot be having an election and, on that day, we say there is a glitch and then we go to court and we win, people would now begin to doubt the system.
So, my take on the census is that if we have it now and the figures are all junk, it would be a case of garbage in, garbage out.
What do you think is wrong with the estimates we have always relied on and how long can we continue to rely on that?
With the estimate, it means we don’t really understand the economy, and the figures we are getting are not really correct. In fact, if you have the census and we don’t get figures, we are actually wasting resources because the huge cost is not accompanied by serious benefits to society. If you spend so much money and at the end of the day the figures do not reflect reality, the money we spent is just waste.
There is what we call planning without facts in Economics; we can do projection, we can look at how many people have NIN in the country or how many people have BVN, then we can do extrapolation and look at the number of people in the banking system, look at the proportion of people in banking and have BVN, we can do some projection that if 20 million have BVN or 100 million people have BVN, then we can deduce that about one third of the people are not financially included, so we can look at those outside the banking system and do some extrapolation, so all those ones would come at a low cost instead of spending so much money and at the end of the day, we don’t have something we can rely on.
Do you have a timeline by which we can put all of these structures in place?
It can be done now because it is due. We need to have the census. It will help us to plan but my fear is even if we do it at the right time without doing it well, have we achieved anything? It is just like somebody trying to marry and you say, ‘I must marry now, I must marry now’. If you marry now and you marry somebody that will kill you, you would say I wish I didn’t get married. While you are rushing to get married, you would make sure that you get the right woman, not the one that would come and use a dagger when you are sleeping and kill you or put rat poison in your soup while you are eating.
So, I keep emphasising on the credibility of the process but we need to have it now, put in place technology, checks and balances, check what obtains in other jurisdictions that make their counting to be reliable.
If we can give away our national pride, we can get the United Nations (UN) to count for us and it will be cheaper. And if they do it without any compromise or bias or influence by the government, we can rely on the figures for planning and of course we also have to look at the issue of our borders. Make sure you close the borders so that we can know exactly how many people we are.
Even if you don’t close the borders, make sure there is limited explosion in the figure. Look at the borders, make sure people are not trooping in from another country.