Why We Must Have Accurate Population Of Nigerians – Osinbajo

Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo has stressed the importance of accurate population of Nigeria for proper national development planning, especially including some of the Buhari Presidency’s Social Investment plans.
At a meeting today with a delegation from the National Population Commission (NPC) in the Aso Rock Presidential Villa, Abuja. The Vice President insisted: “we must be able to honestly determine how many we are as a people.”
According to him, reliable harmonized data base will help socio-economic planning, including the homegrown school feeding programme and the conditional cash transfer, two of the several social investment plans of the Buhari Administration.
Professor Osinbajo tasked the Commission to conduct a reliable, cost-effective and acceptable census bearing in mind the irregularities that have trailed some of the previous census exercises.
“Technology has now made it possible to harmonize data. With technology, we can actually bring down the cost of data-gathering.”
He said that because of technology, data gathering has also become simpler, more efficient and cheaper.
The Vice President said that a single platform for data management in the country is very important for national planning and economic development.
In his presentation earlier, the Chairman of the Commission, Eze Duruheoma, said the Commission is working with other agencies and stakeholders such as the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) to produce a single platform of data management for the country.
This, he said will reduce cost in the future and ensures authenticated identities as well as easy personal identification.
He said that the national population register which is being planned to be put up by the NPC would be the primary source of data, adding that it will give reliable identification of the citizens from the “cradle to the grave.” [myad]