Dr Tony Aiyejina, the Federal Commissioner for the National Population Commission (NPC) of Edo State has revealed why the 2023 census exercise was postponed.
Aiyejina stated on Wednesday that the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC’s decision to move up the date of the 2023 general elections in was a major factor in the NPC’s decision to postpone the 2023 population count.
He explained that the coming of the rains put an end to the exercise to uphold the principle of simultaneity, which governed census exercises worldwide.
The Commissioner, who spoke during an interactive media chat hosted by the Commission in Benin guaranteed that the exercise, whenever it took place, would not only be accurate but also trustworthy and auditable.
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He also insisted that the introduction of Personal Digital Assistant machines would eliminate all human errors of the earlier exercises.
He also debunked public claims stating that the Commission had spent eight hundred billion naira before the exercise was delayed.
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The NPC Commissioner said:
“The postponement of the election by INEC led to the shift of the census. However, with the rainy season, the census is no longer possible at this time.
“The censuses of the past were riddled with controversies. One thing about the 2023 census is that the immediate past president, Muhammadu Buhari did not attempt to teleguide the commission.
“We opted for digital census and we introduced the Personal Digital Assistant which is deliberately configured and can be tracked to monitor fieldwork.
“This is to ensure that the census will not only be accurate, but it will also be reliable and auditable. But because elections and census in Nigeria have a relationship, we intend to insulate the census from politics.
“We thought that a gap of two months or so after the election will suffice. But whatever happened in INEC affected NPC which had to adjust its timeline from March to May before we ran into a quagmire due to the rain, which made the postponement inevitable. It is not because we did anything wrong or something went wrong.”
He further said:
“Census is for future planning and not for the present government. This is why it is important that everything is done to make the figure accurate so that the government can plan well. The government needs accurate statistics to plan with scientific certitude. Nigeria can catch up with the developed countries of the world if we provide accurate census figures for the government to plan.”
He emphasized the importance of an accurate census so that the media could hold the government accountable.
He also allayed concerns that the PDAs might malfunction similarly to the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, and urged Nigerians to have faith that the NPC would conduct the best census in the country’s history.
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Despite the postponement, the Commissioner assured that all the sensitive materials for the exercise were stored at the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN’s branch in Benin.
Meanwhile, other materials had been distributed to the state’s 18 local governments, where District Police Officers had kept them safe.
Urging state residents to be available whenever the Commission was prepared for the exercise, he said:
“while the apathy in an election can be excused, that cannot be accommodated in a census.”
He then advised them not to relocate to their hometowns but rather to be counted wherever they were.
