A simple matter of birth and death

The other day one of your grown-up son needed a copy of his birth certificate, issued all of twenty-five years ago, which he had somehow misplaced. It fell to you to go through the process of obtaining a reissue on his behalf.

It was a chance to get a real-time update on one of the areas emblematic of Nigeria’s underdevelopment as a nation.

The despair you would feel at the end of the experience was predictable.

One of the fundamental assumptions concerning a modern nation is that from one moment to another, it is able to tell the number of its citizens. This is through periodic census exercises where all its citizens are counted, complemented by an accurate and real time record of births and deaths.

In both of these areas, the performance of Nigeria to date has been, sadly, a massive and embarrassing failure.

The truth, the real truth, the sad truth, is that nobody knows how many Nigerians there are in the world. Nobody knows with any accuracy, how many children are born daily in this country. The best figures, which are bandied about by government agencies and inter

national ‘partners’, are guess-timates’.

Nigeria is a country that has grown in a rapid and unwieldy manner. Government functionaries like to celebrate the notion that Nigeria has the largest economy in Africa. Such facts sound nice and seem to imply that life is good for Nigerians. That, of course, is not true, as anyone on the ground would quickly verify. A lot of growth has taken place, without a commensurate amount of ‘development’. Part of the reason why ‘development’ fails to take place is that there is a paucity of accurate statistics on which workable developmental plans may be based.

There is a much-criticised Coroner’s Law nominally in force in Lagos, the only state in the federation that makes any effort to track numbers and causes of death, including those citizens who die outside the hospital system. Sadly, the law is observed mostly in the breach. It means husbands and wives, neighbours, friends, enemies, office colleagues could, and probably do, kill each other by poison, by bludgeoning or by other means and get away scot free every day, especially where the incident does not attract attention and can be passed off as ‘natural death’. Back to the matter of births. There is an agency of the Federal Government of Nigeria known as the National Population Commission. It has a large bureaucracy, spread across the nooks and crannies of the nation, including every one of the 774 Local Government Areas. Its officers are supposed to issue a birth certificate to every new-born Nigerian. The way it works is that in every hospital or primary care centre where deliv‘plausible eries are carried out, the parents of the new baby are advised to go to the nearest location of the NPC to register their bundle of joy and collect a birth certificate. Being Nigerians, of course, many such parents see no need to go to such trouble. They simply take their baby home.

This is not to speak of babies born at home or at facilities run by other persons such as traditional birth attendants.

Sitting with the hard- working officers of the NPC in their cubicle next to a Maternity Hospital in Lagos during your search, and visiting the decrepit headquarters of the agency in Surulere where the roof was falling down in many places, brought home to you on this day the absurdity and futility of a country that refused to think out of the box.

Large numbers of NPC staff daily sat under-employed all over the nation waiting for parents of children who would not come. Nurses meanwhile and TBAS delivered children but could not force the parents to register them at the NPC office next door. Of course, the nurses could simply take the statistics of the babies they birth and hand them over to the NPC to be uploaded into a centralised computer system daily! The printing and collection of the birth certificate would then be a formality that could be done any time, even several years later. That way the system would only be left to chase after the babies born at home, or in other places.

But in Nigeria, birth registration was not the ‘statutory’ function of ‘Health Ministry’, so its staff would not do it. NPC, the agency that was paid to do the work could not be always there, so it could only do it