Peterside, others welcome suspension of census exercise

The suspension of plans to conduct another census in Nigeria is getting a thumbs up from Nigerians even if many of them say the exercise was needless and that it seemed doomed to fail from the very beginning.

In his comment on his verified twitter handle, Atedo Peterside activist and frontline banker said, “thank God for the postponement of a Census that we do not need. If @nimc_ng would wake up to its responsibilities and issue National Identification Numbers (NIN) to every Nigerian + issue Identity Cards speedily thereafter, we would know how many we are and we will have biometrics as proof.”

Joe Abah another activist say “the focus should be on NIN and it should be tied to the birth and death registers that NPC holds. Lack of funds to issue cards is what was making Nigerians wait 4-5 years to get them. Virtually nobody has BVN cards. The number is enough. People who want cards can pay.”

Yemi Kale, a former Statistician General of the federal and now Chief Economist at KPMG says, “there is already huge information via BVN, NIN etc.”

Read also: The politics of census and unemployment data in Nigeria

According to him, what Nigeria should do is to first harmonise and get registrants to update whatever added information that is required online by offering benefits or incentives to get people to update their information.

“And it can be done all year round. Each new registration gets some benefit. Every recorded death also gets some benefit or some other incentive to go to your Local Government centre to register. Since it is biometrics it will be hard for it to be duplicated especially if all centres are linked electronically.”

He also advised that it will be beneficial “to make the process online Realtime for anybody to log in and see at any time with personal data anonymized so as people register the data are changing across all LGAs and you ensure duplication is not possible. I have never been clear why these things always seem so difficult.”