By 
By Engr. Gbolahan M.A. Alabi-Isama MS., Founder/CEO at Supercomafrica
There’s a tragic irony in Nigeria’s democracy. We want to count citizens through a census, but we’ve neglected to prepare citizens for the weight of their own vote. We build ballot boxes but not minds. We fund enumeration, but not enlightenment.
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The technical committee set up by President Bola Tinubu has now submitted its recommendations on how to finance the long-delayed national census. Yet, beyond the billions, the real crisis is not numbers—it’s knowledge.
Nigeria: No Proper Census
Since 2006, Nigeria has not held a proper census. That means we’ve been planning schools, hospitals, and infrastructure with 20-year-old data. Imagine trying to raise a family today using your father’s pay slip from 2006—it is not just inadequate; it is reckless.
But the deeper tragedy is that our democracy also runs on expired data: an uninformed electorate. Voters are swayed by propaganda, unable to connect collapsing hospitals and empty schools with corruption and looting. This ignorance is not natural—it is manufactured through broken education and deliberate civic disempowerment.
A ballot in the hands of an uninformed electorate is like a machete in the dark: it cuts, but often in the wrong direction.
Census needs Financing; Democracy needs Investment in People
If democracy is to work, then voting must be tied to empowerment. Imagine a Nigeria where the right to vote is paired with civic education, economic understanding, and literacy. Not to exclude, but to inspire. Not to disenfranchise, but to incentivize knowledge and prosperity.
Indeed, just as the census needs financing, our democracy needs investment—not just in ballot boxes, but in the people holding them. We cannot afford to postpone civic education the way we have postponed the census. Counting people without empowering them is like counting seeds but never planting them.
The census will give us numbers. Civic education will give us a nation.
A 2006 census. A 1960 mindset. 2025 needs better.
