ABSTRACT
Researchers and development professionals have been looking for the causes of Nigeria’s persistent underdevelopment since the country gained its independence in 1960. Following the oil boom of the 1970s, when the country boasted of having so much money at its disposal that it struggled with what to do with it, these initiatives gained traction. Despite this, Nigeria showed no signs of development or obvious change. The majority of studies claimed that the country’s disastrous development was mostly caused by corruption, tribalism, and nepotism as well as a long-standing culture of mediocracy and general administrative incompetence. This chapter argues that Nigeria’s developmental concerns are intimately linked to census politics as shown in the Federation’s 2006 population census, while acknowledging that the aforementioned problems contribute as well to the country’s developmental crises. In the Nigerian Federation, who receives what, when, and why is decided using data from a population census, among other things. As a result, there has been a constant push among Nigerian states to inflate census results in order to reap the benefits of having a larger population share in the national population. This predicament has led to an unfair distribution of funds and other resources throughout the Federation, which has led to a situation of distributive imbalance. Inadequacies in the nation’s revenue and power allocation methods, according to our study, are the basic cause of Nigeria’s push to falsify population census data. This explains a large portion of the falsification of the 2006 census data.
