‘Inauspicious timing’ — Afenifere says FG must halt preparations for 2023 census

Afenifere, the Yoruba socio-political group, has called on the federal government to stop the planned May 3 population census. 

In a communique released on Thursday by Sola Ebiseni, the group’s secretary general, Afenifere described the timing of the exercise as “inauspicious” and “impossible in credible implementation”.

Ebiseni said the “citizens are still incensed and distraught by the trauma of violence and brigandage of the elections”.

“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. Afenifere decries the most insensitive deployment of over N100 billion on this wasteful exercise as scandalous and an economic offence,” the statement reads.

“Afenifere bemoans the unthinkable insistence of the Buhari administration in conducting the 2023 national census in spite of the objective realities which make such an important national exercise most inauspicious in timing and impossible in credible implementation.

“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 at another conference in PortHarcourt on the 26th-29th March 2023 and most recently the Methodist Church Nigeria, Diocese of Calabar which all have raised concerns on the possibility of reasonable and genuine participation in an acceptable headcount in the current mood of the nation.

“That 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.

“That all factors considered, including its inability to supervise a transparent electoral process, and a lesser headcount exercise, the integrity deficiency of this administration is abysmally compounded in conducting census in which partisan disputes in Nigeria are often at the level of communities, states, and ethnic nationalities having been politicised over time”.

In March, the federal government announced the 2023 population census would commence on May 3 and end two days later.