The Pan Yoruba socio-political group, Afenifere, on Thursday, faulted the Federal Government’s insistence on conducting the 2023 National census, describing the deployment of billions of Naira for the exercise as scandalous and economic waste.
Afenifere position was contained in a communique issued at the end of the group’s meeting held at the Isanya Ogbo residence of its leader, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, who criticized President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration for planning to conduct a census at the tail end of its administration.
The group in the communique signed by its national leader, Chief Adebanjo and the Secretary-General, Chief Sola Ebiseni, maintained that all preparation towards the conduct of the exercise must be stopped immediately.
The group noted that “there is no compelling reason why the census must be held by the expiring Buhari administration and calls for all steps and preparations in that regards to be stopped forthwith.
Afenifere decried as most insensitive, the deployment of over N100 billion on the wasteful exercise describing it as scandalous and an economic offence.
The statement reads ” Afenifere bemoans the unthinkable insistence of the Buhari administration in conducting the 2023 National Census in spite of the objective realities which make such an important national exercise most inauspicious in timing and impossible in credible implementation.
“Afenifere recalls that in a paper it presented at the National Consultative Forum on the 2023 Census held at the Banquet Hall, State House Abuja on the 11th of August 2022, it reiterated the imperative of census in national development noting that the application and misuse of Census data had been our bane as a country where we lie to ourselves and the world about our number indulging in laughable projections sometimes based on assumed and fixed percentage of population growth across different parts notwithstanding glaring variables.
” It is in the light of the importance of credible exercise that, in the August 2022 Conference, we strongly advised against the conduct of the Census which, among other reasons, we said could not possibly hold in the same year of a General election.
“Other well-meaning personalities and institutions including the UNFPA Resident Representative in Nigeria who at another Conference in PortHarcourt on the 26th-29th March 2023 and most recently the Methodist Church Nigeria, Diocese of Calabar which all have raised concerns on the possibility of reasonable and genuine participation in an acceptable headcount in the current mood of the nation.
“That Afenifere is particularly bemused that Government expects participation in headcount by citizens still incensed and distraught by the trauma of violence and brigandage of the elections or by those in IDP camps within their country in whose ancestral homes terrorists in occupation will now be counted as new indigenes.
“That all factors considered, including its inability to supervise a transparent electoral process, a lesser headcount exercise, the integrity deficiency of this administration is abysmally compounded in conducting census which partisan disputes in Nigeria is often at the level of communities, states and ethnic nationalities having been politicised over time”
The foremost Yoruba group also called on the judiciary to ensure that all petitions in respect of the Presidential election should be timeously and justly attended to, and resolved before the end of the tenure of the Buhari administration
The group said “On the judiciary and the 2023 presidential election, Afenifere called on the judiciary to ensure that all petitions in respect of the Presidential election be timeously and justly resolved before the end of the tenure of the Buhari administration as the only way the confidence of Nigerians in its intervention may be earned. Precedents in this regard have been laid even by less endowed African countries.
Afenifere, also said that the request by President Buhari for pardon by those he might have hurt along the line of his services to the country, was “relatively short in statesmanship which demands that such apologies be extended to all Nigerians who have been traumatised especially by the pervasive insecurity and marooned in economic quagmire which in the last eight years have rendered life most uninspiring, nasty, brutish and short.
“That it is rather shameful and painful that the President would celebrate, as achievement, the purported containment of insecurity in Abuja where the sovereignty of the nation has been wantonly challenged by terrorists routinely routing the Presidential convoy, Correctional Centres attacked and emptied and some Local Governments in neighbouring Niger State in effective occupation by Boko Haram.
“Afenifere further notes the President’s lamentations of his serial loss of elections until “God sent technology to my rescue through the introduction of the PVC”.
” It is rather more lamentable that the manifest desires of Buhari to improve on the efficacy of the technological processes, inherited from Jonathan, by assenting the 2022 Electoral Act with the BVAS and IREV components, were thwarted by the INEC and security agencies under his watch, while high-level officers of his government were befuddled by partisan considerations to justify relapse to primitivity.
Afenifere however, maintained that only “the emergence of a President of Southern and specifically South Eastern origin will guarantee equity, fairness and peaceful corporate existence of the Nigerian federation and for which we continue to support the victory of Peter Obi of the Labour Party in the 25th February Presidential election and all his endeavours in its realisation”
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