– By Ibrahim Obansa (Lokoja) and Bala Yahaya (Minna)
National Population Commission (NPC), Kogi State Office, has joined its counterparts nationwide to organise a workshop to finalise participatory localities in the headcount across the state.
In his opening address at the workshop, the Chairman, NPC, Nasir Kwarra, enumerated the localities considered to include: right spellings, appendage of centroid coordinators of locality area, locality type such as tertiary, secondary, primary and sub-primary.
The address delivered by the federal commissioner in-charge of Kogi, Prof. Jimoh Isah, added that locality clarification comprising six strata of urban/rural spectrum locality would be appended according to ‘Fact Analysis’ done by the Cartography Department.
The NPC chairman also disclosed that the compendium of locality, which would be presented to President Muhammadu Buhari before the 2023 Census, would be approved by the consensus of stakeholders as the Gazetteer of place names for the country.
“With the huge resources that the country has expended on Enumeration Area Demarcation (EAD), we are happy that NPC has acquired a lot of data sets that will be useful for national development.
“I, therefore, implore all participants at this workshop, especially those from sister agencies, to work with us to achieve an excellent result, which we shall be proud of at the end of the programme,” Kwarra pleaded.
Also, NPC has said that getting the 2023 population and housing census right is a task that must be done, as it is committed to ensuring that everything about the census is done right and professionally.
The Federal Commissioner representing Niger State, Mohammed Usman, said this while declaring open state level compendium of localities workshop in Minna, yesterday.
Usman explained that the objective of the workshop was to compile all the localities demarcated during the EAD on local councils basis showing the coverage and location on interactive maps.
He added that the compilation would be presented to the local council stakeholders in the state and the soft copy of the local list given to the council chairmen.
According to him, the compendium of locality in census is a tool for census data dissemination for national planning and development.
Usman urged Nigerlites to partner the commission to give the state reliable demographic data through the census, reiterating that population remains the greatest asset in national development; hence, it must be harnessed to make life worth living for the people.
Earlier, the Director, NPC, Niger State, Nma Shehu, had stressed that the workshop marked a major step towards the conduct of the 2023 population and housing census, pointing out that the large turn-out of stakeholders was an indication that the exercise would be successful.
