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By Alex Last
BBC News, Nigeria
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In the heart of Lagos Island, the normally traffic-clogged streets are empty and instead children have turned the roads into improvised football pitches.
Many Nigerians agree that the census is needed
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Lagos's estimated 15m population is heeding the call to stay at home and be counted.
The counting process is under way, but census teams are difficult to find in this vast city.
But this is the first day of a five-day exercise.
They move through areas in small groups, clad in bright orange and yellow vests.
I found one team in the poverty-stricken Abari compound, a cluster of wooden and tin shacks reached by a dirt track next to an open sewer.
The enumerators' task is to talk to households and fill out a large questionnaire - everything from how old they are to how they dispose of their waste.
'Waste of resources'
One of the officials, Olasunkami Majolagbe, normally a student, says he is generally greeted with initial suspicion.
"Some people complain they receive no benefit from the government. When we explain that the census will help the government provide services, they start to co-operate."
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You don't need a census to improve roads and hospitals
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After filling in the huge form, the families have their thumbprints taken and their fingers marked with a purple pen to show that they have been counted.
Most of those who had been counted were happy with the process and said it was a good idea.
But Chris Chukwugbogu said all he wants is material help from the government "so the count has no meaning".
"This population counting is a waste of resources," said Nofiru Afolayan.
"You don't need a census to improve roads and hospitals."
The government says precisely the opposite - the census will let it know where its resources are needed most and so where hospitals, for example, should be built.
The issues of religion and ethnicity are deliberately left off the questionnaire, considered to be too sensitive in a multi-ethnic and religiously divided country.
But people we spoke to said they were asked where they were originally from and in Nigeria that is at least an indication of ethnicity and to some extent, religion.
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