Caboose

Last year’s census is still causing arguments here, with all sorts of wild claims flying around. One of the big problems has been the announcement that Kano state has a slightly larger population than Lagos state, when obviously there are more people in Lagos!

Chippla’s Weblog has a very sensible post on this subject, pointing out the difference in population density between the two states.

Quite apart from the organisational problems of the census, one of the major difficulties seems to have been the tendency for people to travel back to be counted in their hometowns. In some cases this was being organised and promoted by ethnic organisations, to ensure that their numbers would be high and to increase their share of Federal jobs and money. So cities with large non-indigenous populations emptied around census time and, as a result, will have been undercounted and will probably be under-resourced in future.