AWKA (Nigeria), March 23: Police beefed up security in southern Nigeria on Thursday after a violent start to the country’s first census in 15 years left 10 dead and scores injured. Census counters want the exercise to be extended, saying the five days allocated were not enough time to count everybody in Africa’s most populous country, where an estimated 120 to 150 million citizens live.

President Olusegun Obasanjo has made counting the citizenry a priority, insisting it is a vital tool in any development strategy for a country where most people live in abject poverty despite the state’s vast oil revenues.

But the census has also reopened the west African giant’s deep religious, ethnic and religious fissures and stirred street violence in the kind of clashes that have already seen 20,000 killed over the past seven years.

“There are pockets of violence and skirmishes in some areas around Anambra state” in the southeast, said police spokesman Fidelis Agbo, speaking in the southern city of Awka, capital of the restive state.

“We have deployed more men to some of the trouble spots in the state like Onitsha, Nnewi, Ihiala and Awka,” Mr Agbo said, but stressed the violence was not serious enough to disrupt counting.

Nine people — three policemen and six vigilantes — were killed in a shootout on Monday in the nearby market town of Nnewi when security forces tried to search a house for suspected ‘Biafran’ separatists.—AFP