By Ozioruva Aliu, BENIN CITY

The Federal Commissioner representing Edo State in the National Population Commission (NPC), Dr. Tony Aiyejina, on Wednesday, explained that the shift in the 2023 general elections by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), was the major reason the NPC postponed the 2023 population census.

Aiyejina made this disclosure at an interactive media chat organised by the Commission in Benin where he also said that with the coming of the rainy season, the Commission could not immediately fix a new date for the headcount in order to uphold the principle of “simultaneity” which guides census exercises world over.

He assured that once a new date is fixed for the exercise, it would be accurate, reliable and auditable and would mark a clear departure from the controversies that trailed the censuses of the past.

The Commissioner said that the introduction of the Personal Digital Assistant (PDAs) machines would eliminate all human errors of the past exercises.

While dispelling the allegation that N800b has been spent by the Commission, he said “NPC had expended N200 billion out of the N800 billion budgeted for the exercise before it was postponed.”

“Let me say this, censuses of the past were riddled with controversies. One thing about the 2023 census is that the immediate past President Muhammadu Buhari did not attempt to teleguide the Commission.

“We opted for the digital census, and we introduced the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) which is deliberately configured and can be tracked to monitor fieldwork. This is to ensure that the census will not only be accurate, but will also be reliable and auditable. But because elections and census in Nigeria have a relationship, we intend to insulate the census from politics. We thought that a gap of two months or so after the election would suffice. But whatever happened in INEC affected the NPC which had to adjust its timeline from March to May before we ran into a quagmire due to the rain, which made the postponement inevitable. It is not because we did anything wrong or something went wrong”, Aiyejina explained.

Aiyejina stressed that with the accurate census, the media could hold the government accountable, just as he allayed the fears that the PDAs could malfunction the way the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and urged Nigerians to be optimistic that the NPC would give the nation the best census ever.

He assured that the postponement notwithstanding, all the sensitive materials for the exercise were warehoused at the Benin branch of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), while other materials had been distributed to all the 18 local government areas of the state, where the District Police Officers (DPOs), had kept them save.