ABSTRACT

Attempts at successful census in the past came to naught largely because figures were doctored. The passion for doctoring figures is stronger now than even before because the higher a state in population, the more revenue it receives from the federal government. Measures are adopted to reduce movement and this prevents the citizens from going for their daily normal business activities during the manual census days. The other flip side of this restriction is that of undercounting. In Lagos, for instance, during the 1991 census, traders in some communities waited for upwards of two days for the enumerators to come and count them, only for the enumerators not to come. Such traders, after waiting in vain took off to their trading points. They were neither counted at home or at the trading points. In view of the afore-mentioned problems of the manual population census of Nigeria, the researcher decided to develop a website which will be published on the World Wide Web for Nigerian online census registration in order to provide a better census that is more accurate to a measurable and reliable extent. The security measure to be deployed in checking against multiple registration or enumeration is through the use of the national identity card PIN (Personal Identification Number). First, every Nigerian wishing to register for census anywhere in the world supplies his national identity card particulars, which will be matched with the corresponding fields in an already existing identity card particulars file for authentication before having access to the main registration forms. This is implemented with the PIN matching property of a database. Second, he completes the values on the registration forms and finally submits it to a database where it is stored and counted. Moreover, the database administrator can update the database in case of reported death of a Nigerian citizen that had already registered for the online census in order to reflect the actual number of people living in the country at any particula time.