Regular Population Census and Sustainable National Development in Nigeria; A Cost And Benefit Analysis

This paper examined the issues around census population and its impact on sustainable national development by comparing the budgetary cost of conducting regular population census with the developmental cost of not conducting regular population census. Data for the study were generated through a well-structured questionnaire from purposively selected respondents in the ministry of Finance, ministry of Budget & National Planning and National Population Commission. 300 respondents were enumerated and the data generated was coded and analyzed with STATA with the help of the descriptive statistics which was used to address the objectives of the study with mean cut-off of 2.5 for acceptance or rejection. The result showed (mean = 3.22) which implies that the developmental cost of not conducting regular population census outweighs the budgetary cost of conducting population census regularly. As a result, we recommended that national development planning must be based on up-to-date data generated from regular decennial population census and followed up with the estimations of the National Bureau of Statistics within the intervals.