Last week, one of the trending national news headlines was a query purportedly issued the chairman of the National Population Commission, Chief Festus Odimegwu by the Presidency over his reported comments on the nation’s past census conducted by previous administrations. It was widely reported that the Presidency felt uncomfortable that the comments negated his position as the NPC boss. Before the purported query, there were speculations that he had been suspended from his exalted office. However, Odimegwu denied both the rumoured suspension and the query stories, saying that, “What they are saying is not true; it is blackmail. It is propaganda… (It) is the propaganda by those who are jittery concerning the reforms we are bringing to the NPC”, he stated.
To some analysts, it is quite unambiguous that there is much to the current public interest about the developments at the Odimegwu-led NPC than he wants the nation to believe. As it would be recalled, Odimegwu had, in a recent interview with journalists in Abuja, said that Nigeria is yet to have any credible census. Pegging his fact on distortion and falsification of figures for selfish and political reasons, he said, “No census has been credible in Nigeria since 1816. Even the one conducted in 2006 is not credible. I have the records and evidence produced by scholars and professors of repute. This is not my report. If the current laws are not amended, the planned 2016 census will not succeed.”
Undoubtedly, Odimegwu’s remark on the history of census in Nigeria was the boiling-point of the controversy over national census in Nigeria. Immediately, this attracted an avalanche of media retributions and castigations thereby rekindling vested interests in the unsettled issue of head count in the country. The climax of this came from Kano State Governor, Rabiu Kwankanso, who at a meeting with President Goodluck Jonathan, faulted the appointment of the NPC boss in the first place. He told the media that, “We are not happy about that appointment; (we) think that it was a mistake. Odimegwu shouldn’t be there in the first place. He had only worked in alcoholic industry all his life. And my guess is that he’s taking a lot of his products and that is why we feel that his appointment is a mistake because he cannot be the chairman of NPC and at the same time attacking what his predecessors had done.”
Expectedly, Governor Kwankwaso’s reaction and media statements attracted a rebuttal from NPC’s chairperson of Public Affairs Committee, Oluseyi Aderinokun-Olusanya, who in a statement said “the governor’s call for the sack of NPC chairman was diversionary, ill-advised and a reckless attempt to politicise the yet-to-be conducted 2016 census.”
The acidic and acrimonious opprobrium being generated in the public domain because of the statement by the NPC boss is quite unfortunate. We are of the opinion that the highly placed Nigerians on both divides ought to have been more circumspect in their actions and public statements. We firmly hold that politicising this issue of head count, which is a most fundamental prerequisite for genuine national planning-the bane of tractable national development in Nigeria since independence-is the least the country deserves in her match towards the realisation of the millennium goals and Vision 20: 2020.
We advise Chief Odimegwu to concentrate on the goal of giving Nigeria a credible census in 2016. This, we believe, could best be achieved if the NPC boss does not take his eyes off the ball by constantly reminiscencing on President Goodluck Jonathan’s charge to the Board of the Commission at its inauguration in 2012 that “The critical place of the NPC in the realisation of our Administration’s holistic Transformation Agenda can be properly appreciated when we consider the established fact that there cannot be genuine, sustained development if it is not anchored on accurate and reliable data, as no meaningful planning is possible without dependable data and statistics