What really is the (voting) population of Nigeria?
This question — ‘What really is the population of Nigeria?’ has crossed my mind a couple of times in recent weeks after the 2023 Nigerian Presidential Elections. Don’t get me wrong, I know what Google says. I know what the United Nations says. I know what World Bank data says. I know what is on the lips of informed Nigerians.
Hey, that should be about 200 million people right? Yes, that is the general consensus and estimate that most credible organizations have provided. Actually, projections from the United Nations estimate the figure to be 222,266,136 people in 2023.
I do not disbelieve them, No. I’ve just become a bit more curious about those figures for this simple reason — Nigeria has a problem with numbers. I’ll attempt to highlight this problem with 2 examples.
- Nigeria’s problem with numbers: A faulty voter’s register and lack of votes integrity
- Nigeria’s problem with numbers: Unavailability of official statistics
A faulty voter’s register and lack of vote integrity
The 2023 elections were very crucial for many Nigerians and the expectations were that many people will turn out to vote for their preferred candidates due to the ‘existential’ nature of the election. The electoral body revealed that 93 million people were registered to vote in the elections. About 87 million collected their permanent voter’s cards, making them eligible to vote in the elections.
Despite the nature of the elections, only 24.9 million people — about 28% – of all eligible voters in Nigeria, participated in the Presidential election. It’s obvious from the image below that voter turnout has been steadily decreasing despite the increase in the stakes of the elections and the eligible voter population.
Are you curious about why these numbers have been declining over the years? Is it the ‘japa’ phenomenon? Is it voter intimidation? Is it voter apathy? Is it due to economic instability? Or is this a representation of the actual reality on the ground? Many commentators allude to voter apathy as the cause of this decline but is that really true? Let’s begin by investigating the eligible voters’ register.
I must first state that voting registers can be problematic everywhere. They only represent at best, a snapshot in time. People frequently migrate, relocate and die by the second, so they can never be accurate at every given moment. However, I believe Nigeria’s voting register falls short of a register database with integrity. There is a high likelihood that it is grossly over-stated. For example in early 2022, INEC explained that it cannot remove dead voters from its register (the current register has been compiled since 2010) because “the country does not have reliable data of births and deaths and the commission cannot engage in arbitrary removal of the names of individuals it suspects are deceased.” This situation guarantees the dead a right to vote, as Chidi Odinkalu states in this write-up (ThisDay article). Therefore, one can imagine the number of dead persons that are on the register after 13 years, not even including dud, displaced, or emigrated persons. How about the numerous under-aged voters that were recently discovered in the register prior to the 2023 elections? That is still an issue INEC would need to solve to clean up its database.
Further analysis and research will help to validate what factors really contribute to this decline as well as the irrational relationship of voting numbers to the wider trends in the population. However, I for one, believe that voter apathy in Nigeria is a sort of myth (especially in most recent elections). Nevertheless, from reports surrounding the recent elections, one can make sense of certain factors which are contributing to the decline in voter turnout.
The BVAS technology that was introduced in the 2023 elections helped to curb the inflation of votes and accreditation numbers Nigeria has witnessed in the past. In the past, it was possible for insincere politicians and their agents to manually write numbers about the people who were accredited to vote, and hence the number of votes too. For example, in an interview with Arise TV on the 28th of March 2023 (Interview), Femi Falana (SAN) reported that a former Resident Electoral Commissioner highlighted vote discrepancies to him in a particular riverine area in Nigeria. Prior to the 2023 elections, this riverine area usually collated more than 150,000 votes. However, in these 2023 elections, less than 5,000 people voted. He ascribed this to the introduction of BVAS technology that captures actual voters for accreditation.
If the BVAS accreditation really worked properly, it means that the numbers we are seeing for voter turnout are very close to the actual numbers of people that came out to vote during the 2023 elections and most of the previous years’ figures are inflated.
Unavailability of people statistics
It is such a difficult task to get official figures about citizen data in Nigeria. I must state however that this difficulty is compounded by several factors such as limited technological adoption, lack of access to several rural areas (ungoverned spaces), security challenges, etc. For example, the last time Nigeria did a population census was in 2006 (17 years ago). The official population figure of Lagos state at that time was 9.1 million people, imagine what that figure is as of today (it is speculated to be 20+ million people). Moreover, it is recommended that countries carry out a population census every 10 years. The reason why the government and population commission has left it for close to 20 years, is an explanation I believe many would love to hear. The National Population Commission has announced they will conduct a census this year (2023), so hopefully, that will help with more accurate estimations and projections.
World organizations like the UN rely on official census data and registration data (birth, death, and migration) to estimate the population and calculate the population growth rate. As stated earlier, Nigeria does not have reliable data for birth and death, we have census data from 17 years ago and I wonder if official national migration data is made publicly available. However, in 2019, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) handed over the first National Migration Database to the Federal Government of Nigeria at a ceremony that brought together over 100 government officials, donors, and partners working on migration data management in Nigeria. So, I suspect the UN may be using such data for projections.
In summary, the collection, preservation, and unification of data in Nigeria are being done poorly, and I believe the government needs to do a lot more to correct these problems that we have with numbers. Else, we will be relying on unofficial estimations and projections to make decisions, budget allocations, and policies for ‘200 million’ people.
PS — I have to give credit to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and Dr. Yemi Kale (former head of the bureau) for the work they’ve put into making official statistics and reports about several sectors of the country, available to Nigerians.
