The apex socio-cultural organization for the Yoruba people of Nigeria, Afenifere, has lambasted President Muhammadu Buhari over what it termed his “unthinkable insistence” to conduct the 2023 National Census.
Afenifere made the remarks in a communique issued at the end of the regular monthly general meeting of the organization held at the residence of its leader, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, at Isanya Ogbo Ogun State on Tuesday 25th April, 2023, and jointly signed by the leader, Chief Adebanjo, and the Secretary General, Chief Sola Ebiseni.
In the communique, Afenifere bemoaned “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 recalled that in a paper it presented at the National Consultative Forum on the 2023 Census held at the Banquet Hall, State House, Abuja, on the 11th August 2022, it reiterated the imperative of census in national development.
The organization noted 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”.
The communique, issued and signed at Isanya Ogbo, Ogun State this 25th day of April 2023, after exhaustive deliberations on the state of the Nigerian Federation, observed and resolved as follows:
“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 Port Harcourt 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, 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.
“Afenifere decries the most insensitive deployment of over 800 billion Naira on this wasteful exercise as scandalous and an economic offence.
Afenifere conclusively says 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.”
Respecting Buhari’s message of forgiveness to Nigerians “by those he might have hurt along the line of his services to the country”, Afenifere considered the request as 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 economic quagmire which in the last 8 years have rendered life most uninspiring, nasty, brutish and short.
“That it is rather shameful and painful that the President would celebrate, as achievement, the purported containment of insecurity in Abuja where the sovereignty of the nation has been wantonly challenged by terrorists routinely routing the Presidential convoy, Correctional Centres attacked and emptied and some Local Governments in neighbouring Niger State in effective occupation by Boko Haram,” the group stated.
Afenifere further noted 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 concluded
