How many people live in your country? For every country in the world, there is an estimate to answer this question. These answers come with caveats because population statistics are notoriously difficult to track. By nature, they are moving targets: in countries, we count people, but people are born every minute. They die every minute. They migrate across borders or within them. These ebbs and flows make it difficult to have an exact count of the people who exist within a place, so a census captures a moment in time. This means that many governments know enough about how many people live in their country. Nigeria, however, does not.
I do not know how many people live in Nigeria. I have no idea whether Nigeria has 180 million, 250 million or 200 million people, with population figures typically reported as
estimates that vary across reputable sources and over time. I also suspect that no one else knows enough to know what number is closest to the correct one and I worry about this uncertainty. But how can nobody actually know how many people are in a country?
Nigeria is positioned as the
most populous country in Africa, yet it has made no efforts to make a count of its population in 20 years. This is the central paradox. Since 2006, Nigeria has governed itself without knowing the extent to which its cities have expanded, which villages have emptied, how many babies have been born, how its population is distributed by gender, how many communities have been displaced by climate disasters such as floods, how insecurity and insurgency have changed settlement patterns, how many Nigerians have migrated internally or abroad and how many people have migrated into Nigeria. At the centre of these changes, the
statistical figure for which many crucial policy decisions rest on is largely an extrapolation from
2006. For the most part, Nigeria’s government operates in statistical darkness.
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