Pan-Yoruba socio-political organisation, Afenifere has given reasons why the Federal Government must not conduct the 2023 general census.
According to The PUNCH, the group made this known through a communique issued by the group after its monthly meeting on Thursday which was held at the residence of its acting leader, Pa. Ayo Adebanjo.
The organisation lamented the national exercise, which is set to begin on May 3, calling its timing inauspicious and its credible implementation difficult.
According to the group, certain stakeholders had reservations about conducting the census during the general election year, but the government persisted on performing the census. The group also called the N100 billion spent on the exercise a “scandalous and economic offence.”
The group said, “Afenifere recalls that in a paper it presented at the National Consultative Forum on the 2023 Census held at the Banquet Hall, State House Abuja on August 11, 2022, it reiterated the imperative of census in national development noting that the application and misuse of Census data had been our bane as a country where we lie to ourselves and the world about our number indulging in laughable projections sometimes based on assumed and fixed percentage of population growth across different parts notwithstanding glaring variables.
“It is in the light of the importance of credible exercise that, in the August 2022 Conference, we strongly advised against the conduct of the Census which, among other reasons, we said could not possibly hold in the same year of a General election. Other well-meaning personalities and institutions including the UNFPA Resident Representative in Nigeria who was at another Conference in Port Harcourt on March 26-29 2023 and most recently the Methodist Church Nigeria, Diocese of Calabar all have raised concerns on the possibility of reasonable and genuine participation in an acceptable headcount in the current mood of the nation.
“Afenifere is particularly bemused that Government expects participation in headcount by citizens still incensed and distraught by the trauma of violence and brigandage of the elections or by those in IDP camps within their country in whose ancestral homes terrorists in occupation will now be counted as new indigenes.
When all things are taken into account, such as its inability to oversee an impartial electoral process and a less thorough headcount, the administration’s lack of integrity is appallingly exacerbated by the conduct of the census, where partisan disputes in Nigeria are frequently at the level of communities, states, and ethnic nationalities that have become politicised over time.
“Afenifere decries the most insensitive deployment of over 100 billion Naira on this wasteful exercise as scandalous and an economic offence. Afenifere conclusively says there is no compelling reason why the census must be held by the expiring Buhari administration and calls for all steps and preparations in that regards to be stopped forthwith.”
The group urged the judiciary to promptly and fairly address all petitions related to the recently concluded presidential election before the expiration of the Buhari administration’s tenure, as this is the sole means by which Nigerians’ trust in its intervention can be gained.
“Precedents in this regard have been laid even by less endowed countries in Africa,” it noted
