Nigerian censuses and their discontents (II)

When Chief Festus Odimegwu (sorry, I misspelt his surname as Odumegwu last week), the Chairman of the Nigerian Population Commission sacked last October, denounced all the country’s headcounts since the very first one in the Lagos Colony in 1863, not a few of his compatriots from southern Nigeria would have hailed him for having the courage as the country’s first chief census officer to speak “truth” about our censuses – i.e. that it has always been rigged to favour the predominantly Muslim North – to power.