The 2023 Census Is Ill-Timed - Afenifere Tells Buhari

Afenifere, the pan-Yoruba socio-political organization, has talked about the planned 2023 census.

The Afenifere, yesterday, kicked against the proposed conduct of the 2023 National Census, insisting that it could not possibly hold in the same year of the general elections. 

It also urged the judiciary to ensure that all petitions in respect of the Presidential election be timeously and justly resolved, before the end of the tenure of the Muhammadu Buhari administration.

Afenifere stated these in a communiqué issued after its general meeting, held at Isanya Ogbo in Ogun State, by its National Leader and Secretary General, Pa Ayo Adebanjo and Sola Ebiseni, respectively.

On the proposed census, the Yoruba body insisted that “there is no compelling reason 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 communiqué reads: “Afenifere bemoans the unthinkable insistence of the Buhari administration in conducting the 2023 National Census despite the objective realities which make such an important national exercise most inauspicious in timing and impossible in credible implementation.

“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.

“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, a lesser headcount exercise, the integrity deficiency of this administration is abysmally compounded in conducting census which partisan disputes in Nigeria is often at the level of communities, states and ethnic nationalities having been politicised overtime.”

On the judiciary and the presidential election, Afenifere urged the judiciary to “ensure that all petitions in respect of the Presidential election be timeously and justly resolved before the end of the tenure of the Buhari administration as the only way the confidence of Nigerians in its intervention may be earned. Precedents in this regard have been laid even by less endowed countries in Africa.”

Afenifere, also said that the request by President Buhari for pardon by those he might have hurt along the line of his services to the country, was “rather short in statesmanship which demands that such apologies be extended to all Nigerians who have been traumatised especially by the pervasive insecurity and marooned in an economic quagmire which in the last eight years have rendered life most uninspiring, nasty, brutish and short.” 

“Afenifere further notes the President’s lamentations of his serial loss of elections until “God sent technology to my rescue through the introduction of the PVC.

“It is rather more lamentable that the manifest desires of Buhari to improve on the efficacy of the technological processes, inherited from Jonathan, by assenting the 2022 Electoral Act with the BVAS and IREV components, were thwarted by the INEC and security agencies under his watch, while high-level officers of his government were befuddled by partisan considerations to justify relapse to primitivity.” 

It, however, reiterated its position that “the emergence of a President of Southern and specifically South Eastern origin will guarantee equity, fairness and peaceful corporate existence of the Nigerian federation and for which we continue to support the victory of Peter Obi of the Labour Party in the February 25 Presidential election and all his endeavours in its realisation.”