Daily Independent Online.
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Thursday, July 08, 2004.
NPC to recruit 800,000 ad hoc staff
By Onoja Audu
Special
Correspondent,
Jos
A Federal
Commissioner of the National Population Commission (NCP), Chief John Kum, has
said the commission will recruit 800,000 ad hoc staff to carry out the 2005
census successfully.
He added that apart
from this, the NPC would need the support of states, the organised private
sector and non-governmental organisations.
At a press briefing
at the commission’s secretariat in Jos, Plateau State, Kum said,
“Any investment towards the realisation of a successful census in 2005
should be considered as a good investment for Nigeria.”
He said the NPC has
started the field work for phase one of the enumeration area demarcation (EAD)
for the 2005 population and housing census in some selected local governments
in the country.
According to him,
the EAD fieldwork is the major preparatory activity for the census, stressing
that the exercise would involve the delineation of the entire country into
small geographical units that could conveniently be covered by a pair of
enumerators.
He said the
fieldwork was meant to ensure that a comprehensive enumeration of the
population was carried out by preventing overlapping or omission.
Kum also hinted
that the preparatory activities of EAD was to be implemented in three phases
spread over 13 months from July 2004 to July 2005. He said the first phase has
already began from July 1 to 31 in seven local government areas (LGAs) in the
six geographical zones- Ukwa East in Abia State, Jadda (Adamawa) Brass (Bayelsa
State), Bokkos (Plateau State) Ifo (Ogun State), Shagari (Sokoto State) and
Abuja Municipal Area Council (FCT).
According to him,
phase two of the exercise will last the whole of September in one local
government area in each of the 36 States and FCT while the remaining 731 LGAs
were to be covered under phase three that would last for seven months from
January 2005.
He said the
commission was very careful in selecting the seven LGAs to be covered under
phase one. “Each of the LGAs poses specific challenged to the
commission’s capabilities and it is a test case for the NPC to fashion
out strategies to surmount the challenges that it might likely face during the
2005 census.”
