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The issue of counting Nigeria’s Population - Part 2

This year there was a fire in a Northern London tower block that killed a lot of people. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea happens to one of the richest with an average income that will be others' envy. There is an accusation of social cleansing, forcing low-income earners out of its expensive borough. Part of the policy may seem to be that the borough’s alleged action on social housing. It was thought that they had a policy of doing the barest minimum for the blocks, making them uninhabitable, frustrating the tenants, and indirectly forcing them out. Allowing the council then to convert the run-down area to luxury flats for the very rich. The borough has one of the highest salary disparity in the world, hence causing widespread inequality. So, after people died due to what seems to be due to cheap flammable building materials. It was not long before the fingers began pointing. There was political blaming, and the government was accused of hiding the true number of fatalities due to the fear that it would produce a public outcry and lead to riots. The number was initially conservative, less than 10, then it increased to 20s, with an estimation of people dying in its hundreds. The flat was said a significant number of illegal immigrants who would not want to be counted officially. This led the government today to say that this will not be taken into consideration and action will not be taken on this issue when investigating the number.



Now, David Lammy MP for Tottenham, London, had indicated that he was made aware by many people that the number dead in the fire had been underestimated. He believes that the government has not engaged the public, and many relatives have not come forward due to their immigration status. Hence, the number of people affected has been distorted due to political reasons. He mentioned that in this time and age, the government can know the actual number of people living in the block of flats. He indicated that they have access to the voter’s register, GP’s list, NHS database, social services, social media, etc. Then there are schools with data about the children, their parents and the further contacts who are not relatives but live nearby. There are financial details for the people living in the tower block. Fast food services, restaurants, libraries, clubs, pubs, supermarkets, etc., all of these institutions are constantly asking for our addresses and collecting data. Then they are online activity been recorded. This will give people a notion of who lived where. Mobile phone companies do supply services, cable companies, other services. After collecting all the data and analyzing it, they can reach a number that they can be fairly comfortable with. Hence all they needed is a police order requesting all organization to forward data concerning all tenants. There is the issue that some of the bodies will never be found, as there are extreme heat conditions that might be likened to that of a furnace. The bones might have been burnt to ashes, and even if there are bones, they might be so affected that the DNA might have been destroyed. And of the 22nd of July, 2017, people presumed dead was 80 and 39 officially identified.

Now, the analysis had edged on with all the data, we have entered the era of big data. It has been said that 90% of all the information ever produced in the world has been produced in the last 3 years and it is getting bigger. Only 12% of this data has been analyzed, which means that there is a lot of data out there that people don’t know what it’s doing. Before, data processing, storing and manipulating, was costly. Now it is much cheaper. A case in point, the Y2K problem was because to conserve memory, 2 digits were used to represent the year due to the high memory cost. Now, data can be accessed faster, and with bigger databases, processing such later has entered a different phase. There used to be that the data will have to be on only one powerful server and the limitation being the memory size and the processing power of the computer. Now, in the age of parallel processing, theoretically, all computers, especially when using sharing, allows higher scalability. The internet can be used to process data via the cloud.

Data analysis has entered a different phase with data entering from all sources in Nigeria, mobile phone operators, health service providers, school authorities, market sales, water consumed, etc. There have various statistical models which can now predict with an almost high degree of certainty the number of people in the area. With their supercomputers with ever-faster processing power, the number of people will be clearly known. Of course, there will be initially sceptics, but these would be eventually won over. Of course, there are still a few hardcore nut jobs like those that still believe the earth is flat and never went to the moon. But these will be in the diminishing minority, and government policy will not be based on this.

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