It was meant to be just another presidential announcement—another file pushed across the desk, another headline buried in the papers. But if you know how to read between the lines, you’d see it wasn’t routine. It was loaded.
The President had set up a high-powered Census Steering Committee. The job? Simple on paper: oversee the next national headcount. But the truth? That committee would decide who gets what and how much—for the next decade.
The census isn’t just a tally of heads. It’s the engine that drives money, power, roads, schools, hospitals, and even who gets to sit in parliament. It’s the country’s official scoreboard. And this time, someone’s rigging the game.
Eight men and women made the list. Five from one corner of the country—the South West. Three others from the North. That’s eight seats at the table. And not a single one from the South East or South South. Zilch. Zero. Invisible.
You could almost hear the silence screaming.
This wasn’t an oversight. It was a pattern. A calculated move dressed in protocol. And anyone who says otherwise is either blind or benefits from the darkness.
Let’s roll the names:
Bagudu. Idris. Kwarra – North.
Edun. Adedeji. Odusote. Okunola. Oyinade – all South West.
That’s not a committee. That’s a private club.
You’d think in a country of 200 million people, someone would have noticed the imbalance. Someone would have said, “Hold on, where are the voices from the Niger Delta? Where’s the Southeast?” But no one blinked. Not even the press.
Truth is, we’ve seen this movie before. The same script—just different actors.
They want you to think it’s about competence. About availability. About merit. But the old-timers know better. When the cards are always dealt from the same hand, you don’t call it luck. You call it loaded.
Historically, census planning followed one golden rule: balance. Keep every region in the room, or risk tearing the country at its seams. That rule just got tossed out like yesterday’s briefing memo.
Now here’s the real kicker: the people with no seat at the table will still be expected to play the game. They’ll line up for headcounts. Their kids will sit exams. Their governors will beg for federal allocations. But when the numbers come in—and the decisions get made—they’ll be watching from the sidelines.
So ask yourself: when a process that’s supposed to count everyone starts by excluding entire regions, what exactly are we counting?
This isn’t paranoia. It’s pattern recognition.
And the ones being left out? They’re not ghosts. They’re citizens. Taxpayers. Voters. Builders. Survivors.
Someone needs to answer for this. And the rest of us? We’d better start asking the right questions—before the country gets counted into silence.
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D-BIGPEN
