I Won’t Advise Anyone To Conduct National Census In 2018 — Dogara

Consequently, he advised that the population
census be postponed to avoid coming out with
figures that would not reflect the actual population
of the country. Dogara also advised people clamouring for the
conduct of the census in 2018 to exercise patience
till after 2019 elections when there would be no
political pressure to manipulate its outcome. Yakubu Dogara The speaker in a statement signed by his Special
Adviser on Media and Public Affairs, Turaki
Hassan, yesterday, in Abuja, was of the view that
conducting population census in an election year
might generate unrealistic results, advising that it
should be the next administration that should take care of the census at the beginning of its tenure
when not much would be at stake. He said: ‘’I won’t advise anyone to conduct
national census in 2018. I said it before that if we
are not going to achieve it in 2017, then we should
just forget it until after 2019. “If you conduct census at the time of elections,
there will be so much pressure, crisis and the lure
for people to manipulate the figures for political
reasons, such that the agency cannot even cope
with. “So it is better for a fresh administration to conduct
this exercise from the beginning of that
administration when we do not have any pressure
of elections in sight. ‘’Then, we may have something that resembles
reality, but I can bet you if the census is
conducted in 2018, the outcome will be doubtful.” “Seriously speaking, because I know who we are
and I know the kind of litigation, backlashes, the
pressure and we don’t need that now, to be
candid. ‘’We have so many challenges, let’s empower the
agencies to keep building on the blocks that they
will leverage on in the future in order to do the
exercise but doing it in 2018, honestly it is nothing
I would advocate.”