Thank you for this. Nigerian here, and I have to say that you hit the nail squarely on the head. Population counts in Nigeria are deeply political and essentially every region/state is motivated to fake/overestimate their headcount to get a bigger chunk of the oil revenue, which is pretty much the most significant slice of gov. revenue.

But, once you dig into the figures, you realize it'd be a miracle if Nigeria has up to half of the population it claims.

Every single census that's been conducted has been marred by controversy, with states trying to buff up their populations to make their ethnicity/region look bigger and more important.

But, proxies like registered BVN (like Social Security Number, but for bank accounts) are just under 70M. Registered phone lines (~240M; each person usually owns 3-5) are similarly lackluster. Domestic demand is nothing to write home about if you run a CPG business. Zoom into a satellite view of a city that's supposed to have ~700k to 1M people and it looks like a suburb - just scanty.

Nigeria's most populous city claims to have 20M people - 2* the population of Seoul, one of the most urbanized, dense, vertical cities in the world, meanwhile, Lagos is just a sprawling slum.

Personally, I feel population counts across Africa are grossly overestimated. A good estimate would be 600-800M, but where's the fun in that when we can fearmonger about overpopulation?