Police have arrested more than 30 people in southern Nigeria, they said today after a violent start to the first census in 15 years, which has reopened deep ethnic and religious divisions.
“We have arrested more than 30 people (since Tuesday),” police spokesman Fidelis Agbo said, speaking from the southern city of Awka, capital of the unruly Anambra state. “Police will continue to patrol and monitor to make sure that the exercise go on,” Agbo told AFP. Reactions to the headcount in Africa’s most populous country have left at least 10 people dead and scores injured, but President Olusegun Obasanjo has made counting the citizenry — estimated between 120 and 150 million — a priority. Obasanjo has insisted an accurate census is a vital tool in any development strategy for a nation where most people live in abject poverty despite the state’s vast oil revenues. But the exercise has led to street violence of a kind of clashes that has already seen 20,000 killed over the past seven years when the west African giant’s religious and ethnic fissures become very divisive. Nine people — three policemen and six vigilantes — were killed in a shootout Monday in the nearby market town of Nnewi when security forces tried to search a house for suspected ‘Biafran’ separatists, according to police. A senior officer in nearby Onitsha blamed the clash on market vigilantes, but Information Minister Frank Nweke linked it to a campaign against the census by a separatist group seeking to recreate the breakaway “Republic of Biafra”. A secessionist attempt by ethnic Igbos in southeast to form a “Republic of Biafra” in 1967 plunged the nation into a 30-month long civil war in which more than one million people died. Suspected seperatists were also fingered for hacking a young census officer to death with machetes in the nearby market city of Onitsha and wounding five others by spraying them with acid. Nigeria virtually shut down Friday because of a nationwide public holiday combined with a stay-at-home order to enable population counters to go on with their work, but calls are increasing for the counting period to be extended.