The National Population Commission (NPC) on Friday revealed that the commission had spent no less than N200 billion in preparation for the census in eight years. The NPC’s Director of Public Affairs, Isiaka Yahaya, said the insinuation that the sum was spent in the last few years was erroneous as the commission had been preparing for the census since 2014. He stated this during a press conference in Abuja on Friday. “Yes, it is true that N200bn has been spent on preparations for the 2023 Census so far. However, this fund was not expended in the last few weeks, months or years but rather since 2014 when preparations for the 2023 Census actually began.
“Indeed, part of the N200 billion was expended before the coming of the present commission, which was inaugurated twice between 2018 and 2020 and even before the inception of the Buhari Administration,” he said.
Yahaya said the huge sum was spent on different preparatory processes to ensure the exercise comes out with credible and acceptable data.
He stated that chief among its spending was the demarcation of the country into enumeration areas for easy clustering and which has provided the country with data on the number of houses in the country.
He added that the EAD activity led to the purchase of high-resolution satellite imageries of the country’s land space and equipment, training and deployment of thousands of ad-hoc workers, among other costly expenses.
Yahaya also said that a series of workshops involving academia, professional bodies, Civil Society Organizations, and stakeholders were organized at the national and state levels between 2015 and 2017, as well as some test runs.
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