I've never trusted the "official" statistics about Nigeria. It goes beyond the usual knee-jerk distrust of the census.
Bluntly put, our officials, at all three tiers, political and civil-service alike, have a tendency to look us in the face and lie to us. They don't even work hard to make their lies believable, because they know there is accountability and they face no consequences ... even if it were proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they lied.
Nigerian journalists and academics are no better. Far from being sources of information that they (media and universities) independently verified, they either rely on the questionable figures presented by officialdom, or help disseminate the rumours, myths and guesswork of biased "sources" or so-called "witnesses" who did not actually witness any of the things they recount.
And then you have international agencies, foreign governments and assorted external actors. They tend to say whatever sounds like it supports their position. If an NGO wants to raise money, it says everybody in a particular African country will die in the next 10 seconds if money is not raised. If the IMF and World Bank want to convince people that their programmes are successful, they tell you that the programme produced growth of 1,000%, even if none of the people in the specific region/country has seen a shred of evidence to support this claim.
Everyone has an agenda, and everyone quotes numbers, seemingly drawn from the sky, that support their particular bias.
I had two conversations in the space of a few months, many years ago, that illustrate my point. At the time, the "official" figure for Nigeria's population was 120 million. I happened to engage in a conversation with an Igbo classmate, who argued that the Hausa-Fulani had inflated their numbers, and that the Igbo had been under-counted; he told me, with no trace of irony, that there were really 60 million Igbos. Not too long afterward, I happened to be in a conversation with a Yoruba acquaintance, who also believed the Hausa-Fulani had bee over-counted, and also believed that the Yoruba had been under-counted, and insisted to me, again without irony that there were really 60 million Yoruba.
Like I said, the "official" figure for Nigeria's population at that time was 120 million ... so if those two former acquaintances of mine were both correct, then half of Nigeria (60 million) was Igbo, and the other half of Nigeria (60 million) was Yoruba, and there were no other ethnic groups in Nigeria, not even Hausa-Fulani.
Mind you, these rumour-generating machines have a simple explanation for the discrepancy: They look you square in the face and tell you that Nigeria's real population is closer to 200 million, or 250 million or 300 million. They just make up a number that sounds like it will accommodate their outlandish guesstimate about the population of their own subsection of Nigerians.
The fact is, every ethnic group, region and religion in Nigeria thinks they are under-counted and everyone else is over-counted. The reality is .... nobody knows.
I suspect all of the "official" population figures for every part of Nigeria are inflated. We are probably the most populous in Africa, but our population is most likely not as high as 140 million. Not that it matters; our population structure is like a pyramid, with more citizens in the lower age ranges and fewer citizens in the higher age ranges -- eventually all of those youngsters will get married and have children, and unless we lower our average family size, we will explode to 140 million and beyond soon enough. And I should know, as I am one of those young(ish) Nigerians who haven't started adding new Nigerians to the world as of yet.
Mind you, I suspect the population figures of every country in Africa are inflated too. With few exceptions (in Southern Africa and North Africa ... but not Egypt, as they, like Nigeria, have far too many people, living in too unplanned a manner, to keep track of), most African countries don't really have the capacity to make empirical declarations about their population. And while the foreign organizations like to act as if they are more "expert" on Africa than the Africans, the blunt fact is they are even less informed about African issues than the African governments whose "administrative capacity" they constantly bemoan.
What prompted this outburst of cynicism (more like realism, but why argue the point)?
A report in the excellent Daily Nation, that's what. Apparently, Kibera, the "largest slum in Africa" is not even 10% as large as its hype. Variously estimated to contain between one million and two million people, Kibera is actually home to "only" about 170,070 people.
There are lots of people, in Kenya and (more importantly in my view) outside it with vested financial interests in maintaining the myth that Kibera is a slum of gigantic, monumental, epic, earth-shattering proportions. But forget that for a moment.
It has always baffled me that so many "reputable" people and "credible" entities bandy about numbers, figures and statistics about "Africa" as if there was some kind of empirical basis to their numbers. The thing is, I know for a fact that most countries in Africa have no idea how many of their citizens are living with HIV/AIDS (to use an important example), and if those countries' governments don't know, the foreign agencies, foreign governments, foreign other-entities, academics, "researchers" (yeah, right), journalists, etc, etc do not know either.
Yet, somewhere, a number emerges and everyone latches on to this number, and purport to make important, consequential decisions based on this number.
Like I said, at a certain level it doesn't matter.
Nigeria will reach 140 million sometime this century, so it is okay if we make economic/political/social plans based on this number. Unfortunately, we don't really make any plans, or rather we repeatedly make lots of plans (that don't make sense) and then repeatedly fail to execute any of the plans.
Likewise, if one million people are going to starve, but you deftly raise funds sufficient to feed ten million, then (in theory) there is nine million person's worth of reserves in place for the next crisis. Unfortunately, people enjoy making grandiose pledges, even when they know they intend from the start to pay only a small (and insufficient) fraction of what they pledged. More to the point, only Jah knows what the agencies do with the money and food that they receive; not to sound petty and "ungrateful" but NGO workers in Africa live First World lifestyles while surrounded by people living Tenth World lifestyles, who have been living Tenth World lifestyles, and who will continue to live Tenth World lifestyles for the foreseeable future (even as the NGO workers take time off from their First World lifestyles to lament the fact that "billions" in aid over decades have not had an effect).
And as for HIV/AIDS and every other disease affecting my continent and my people, in the absence of empirical statistics, it is ideal in fact to make decisions based on assuming the problems are worse than they really are. By contrast, it would be very, very dangerous to assume the problem is not as bad than is (as former President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa did).
The thing is though, it still doesn't work out well for we the people, because we have no control over the decision-making or the resource-allocation. Whether it be our own government or the foreign entities that are supposedly "helping" us, the tendency is to make decisions over our heads, with no democratic input from us, and no accountability to us for bad planning or execution.
We are objects on which other people act.
But I digress.
If you are wondering why I treat the Kenyan census figures for Kibera as more credible than the guesstimates that have been thrown around for years .... it is because the number sounds a lot closer to reality.
Take the controversy in Nigeria over whether Lagos State or Kano State is the most populous in the country. As I said before, I think the overall population of Nigeria is overstated. By definition, if I am right, the populations of each state have been overstated too. So, continuing along that line of thought, Kano's population is probably overstated. But having said that, the numbers put out by the Lagos State government as the "real" population of Lagos are simply unrealistic.
It is that word, the word "unrealistic".
I do not know what the true, empirical numbers are. No one knows.
But I do know what is realistic and what is not.
Everyone has this stereotypical image of "grinding African poverty" in their minds, but do you realize what life for the residents would really be like if there were really one or two million people squeezed into the tiny confines of Kibera?
As John McEnroe famously said, you cannot be serious.
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