The pan-Yoruba socio-political organisation, Afenifere, on Thursday, asked President Muhammadu Buhari to stop the 2023 National Census.
The group explained that it could not possibly hold in the same year of the general elections.
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.
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.
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.”
