The National Population Commission (NPC), on Friday, confirmed that N200 billion was spent in eight years to prepare for the suspended 2023 national census.
The exercise was suspended towards the end of the immediate past president, Muhammadu Buhari’s administration.
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Isiaka Yahaya, the NPC director of public affairs, revealed this to journalists at a press conference in Abuja on Friday.
He, however, debunked the claim that the money was spent in the last few years, maintaining that the commission had been preparing for the census since 2014. The last census was held in 2006.
“Yes, it is true that N200 billion has been spent on preparations for the 2023 census so far. However, this fund was not expended in the last few weeks, months or years, but rather since 2014, when preparations for the 2023 census actually began,” he said.
“Indeed, part of the N200 billion was expended before the coming of the present commission, which was inaugurated twice between 2018 and 2020 and even before the inception of the Buhari Administration.”
Yahaya said the huge sum was spent on different preparatory processes to ensure the exercise came out with credible and acceptable data.
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He stated that chief among the projects that consumed the money was the demarcation of the country into enumeration areas for easy clustering, which provided data on the number of houses in the country.
“The first preparatory activity for the 2023 Population and Housing Census was the Enumeration Area Demarcation (EAD), which the Commission implemented in phases on an incremental basis spanning over a period of eight years,” Isiaka said.
‘The EAD involved the division of the 774 Local Government Areas of the country into Enumeration Areas. The Enumeration Area Demarcation was done digitally from 2014 to 2022. Given the size of Nigeria, carrying out such expansive field operations must of necessity come with a huge cost.
“Major cost elements in the EAD project include the acquisition of high-resolution satellite imageries of entire land space of Nigeria and equipment, deployment of logistics across the country and training and deployment of tens of thousands of ad-hoc workers for several months to carry out the field operations. All of these were paid for, and heavily too.”
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