Nigeria came to a virtual halt on Friday as the country’s first census in 15 years moved into a fourth day marked by arrests, more violence and growing clamour for the count to be extended.
Cities and towns across the west African giant fell silent as Nigeria’s population — estimated between 120 and 150 million citizens — observed a national holiday coupled with a stay-at-home order to be counted.
In the restive southern Anambra state, a police spokesman said more than 30 suspected separatists were arrested following three days of anti-census protests which left some 10 people dead and scores of others injured.
“We have arrested more than 30 people (since Tuesday),” Fidelis Agbo said, speaking from the southern city of Awka, capital of the unruly state.
“Police will continue to patrol and monitor to make sure that the exercise go on,” Agbo told AFP.
President Olusegun Obasanjo has made counting the citizenry a priority and the five-day exercise is due to end on Saturday, but those involved want more time.
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 its religious and ethnic fissures became very divisive.
Nine people — three policemen and six vigilantes — were killed in a shootout Monday in the southern 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 separatists 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.
In a separate incident Friday five people were injured after a
boundry dispute on the borders of southwestern Edo and Ondo states
while a census official was attacked, apparently by a disturbed man
in Ondo state capital Akure.
Despite positive assessments by National Population Commission
chief Samu’ila Danko Makama, in many places census officials are
yet to get going.
The mammoth exercise has been hampered by the anti-census
attacks, a lack of paperwork, census officials protesting over
salaries and general logistical hiccups.
Pressure was mounting on Makama to extend the exercise which has
already kept people off the streets in the commercial capital of
Lagos since Tuesday.
“With three of the five days already devoted to the resolution
of logistics… it is clear that it is no longer possible to have a
comprehensive and credible headcount in the nation,” said Lagos
state governor Bola Tinubu.
“(I) believe there is an urgent need to extend the period of the
headcount as to ensure the accuracy of the data and the credibility
of the exercise,” Tinubu said in a statement published on Friday.
Calls for an extention were also heard in the northern city of
Kano.
“I don’t think we can finish this job by Saturday because there
are a lot of areas we are yet to cover,” census counter Abdulazeez
Ahmed told AFP.
“I believe we will need at least three more days to count
everyone,” he said.