Mr Chris Mukiza (left), the executive director of the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (Ubos), and junior Finance minister Amos Lugoloobi during a media briefing at Ubos offices in Kampala on May 8, 2024. PHOTO/ FILE
A day after the cgot off to a chaotic, haphazard start, the Executive Director of the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (Ubos), Mr Chris Mukiza, appeared on Capital Gang, a radio show that discusses current affairs, to explain to Ugandans what had gone wrong.
Mr Mukiza launched into a catalogue of excuses. “The politicians were the biggest culprits,” he said, singling out mayors in Kampala he said had brought busloads of people, interviewed and trained them to serve as “backdoor enumerators”. It is not clear why this happened and how Ubos failed to prevent it.
The show’s earlier segment had discussed the May 7 meeting that President Museveni had with traders about taxes. After listening for several minutes, host Oscar Semweya-Musoke said that at the meeting one trader stood up and asked Mr Museveni whether he is still the President.
He then turned to Mr Mukiza and asked: “Are you the national census commissioner?” “Yes, I am,” Mr Mukiza replied.
“So far, the narration is like you are not in charge,” Semweya-Musoke went on, sparking fits of laughter in the studio.
“I am in charge fully,” Mr Mukiza insisted.
To prove to Mr Mukiza that Ugandans were not impressed with the way the exercise was progressing, Mr Semweya-Musoke read out social media posts, including one that said: “Tell Mr Mukiza to first say sorry in capital letters.”
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Although day one had been declared a public holiday to enable the enumerators to find people in their homes, many people in Kampala said they were not counted. All six people on Capital Gang said they had waited for enumerators and saw none.
Nearly everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Here is a snapshot from the headlines about the exercise: Inside messy start of 2024 population census; Census mess: Minister Magezi faults Ubos for not involving LCs; Ubos blames local governments for census failures; Ubos defends census progress amid public criticism; Census 2024: state failure and what hope lies ahead.
In the suburb of Katwe, Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC) reported, enumerators failed to log into the system. Some enumerators complained about non-payment of their daily Shs10,000 training allowance for nine days. Others complained that they had been paid only Shs50,000 for the entire 10-day exercise, yet they are supposed to be paid Shs50,000 per day, bringing the total to Shs500,000.
Ubos has since clarified that the delay in disbursing money was because districts had not verified lists of enumerators and that it has funds for all 114,000 enumerators’ allowances.
Payment issues aside, there was also tragic news. Three enumerators died in the line of duty, although two appear to have succumbed to natural causes.
The census fiasco raises pertinent questions. Ubos had 10 years to prepare and Shs333b to spend on the exercise. Did it really prepare for the exercise? If it did, how thorough were the preparations? Did Ubos really understand it had embarked on a massive undertaking that requires painstaking attention to detail?
If Ubos had done its homework, it would have studied precedents to do with censuses and/or elections to try to avert failure — because low-income countries generally struggle with huge undertakings that involve millions of people. Censuses and elections are often plagued by disorganisation, incompetence, corruption, faulty or malfunctioning equipment, all of which we have witnessed in the just-concluded census.
In January 2002, for example, Uganda held local council elections that were a complete fiasco. At many polling stations, election materials were never delivered. The problem resurfaced in the 2016 election when the Electoral Commission failed to deliver election materials to polling stations in and around Kampala.
Censuses, like elections, present problems that only high-income, highly organised countries can avoid.
Consider this: Nigeria is Africa’s largest economy, but it has not held any census in 18 years. It was supposed to conduct one last year, but it was indefinitely postponed. (And the election it held in 2023 presented problems that are not dissimilar to what we have witnessed in our census. The Economist reported that the system for transmitting results suffered widespread failures and that some agents accidentally sent in selfies instead of the tally sheets they were meant to.)
There is another good example related to a census that Ubos should have studied closely — Liberia. Africa’s oldest republic has a population of just 5.3 million, much smaller than Nigeria’s estimated 200 million and Uganda’s 45 million.
However, the census Liberia conducted in 2022 was a disaster. Enumerators, who had been promised $25 (Shs93,000) per day, did not show up, according to the Voice of America, which reported that then president George Weah fired two officials of the Liberia Institute for Statistics and Geo-information Services (LISGIS). Like Uganda, Liberia had declared a national holiday to ensure the exercise went smoothly.
Some African countries have had census issues that are understandable. Ethiopia has postponed its census twice since 2017 due to protests and ethnic violence. And conflict-battered Democratic Republic of Congo has not held any census since 1984.
Failure as a real possibility
Mr Mukiza and his team would probably have done better had they looked at failure as a real possibility that could only be averted by adequate preparations, consultations, training of enumerators and ensuring Ubos worked with zero interference from politicians.
Technology is helping some countries to streamline census operations, and Ubos used a digital process to conduct the exercise, but still things did not go well.
What can be done/could have been done better? My views are not based on expert knowledge of conducting censuses, but they are appropriate for this situation.
Perhaps the best approach is to study potential problem areas first. The number one problem is always money. No census can be held without money, and some countries that have postponed their censuses are sometimes strapped for money. If you work out the budget and secure funds, it means you have solved probably more than 50 percent of the problem.
A census organiser cannot fail to find enumerators, so you can turn the attention to important matters, such as participation. How do you get all homes and people living in those homes to be counted and to provide information you want that is accurate, complete and truthful? This is arguably one of the greatest challenges, and we do not know yet if Ubos will overcome it.
Once this is addressed, a strategy dealing with misinformation and disinformation campaigns that can discourage people from taking part in the census has to be developed and implemented.
Public information campaigns targeting people who are likely to be influenced by misleading and/or fake information about the census can persuade illiterate and semi-illiterate people who are likely to shun the exercise.
The failures witnessed in the census suggest that the people Ubos is seeking to count are not the problem. They wanted to be counted. There were no media reports, for example, about enumerators receiving hostile reception in people’s homes.
Instead, people were treated to headlines such as this one, just a day before the census: Ubos enumerators tear appointment letters in protest ahead of national census.
This says more about Ubos’s failure to address potential problems than the people to be counted.
The agency will do a post-mortem after the exercise to see what worked well and what did not, but the question many people have asked is whether its data will be reliable given political interference, backroom enumerators and challenges in reaching out to people.
Queries
The census fiasco raises pertinent questions. Ubos had 10 years to prepare and Shs333b to spend on the exercise. Did it really prepare for the exercise? If it did, how thorough were the preparations? Did Ubos really understand it had embarked on a massive undertaking that requires painstaking attention to detail?
If Ubos had done its homework, it would have studied precedents to do with censuses and/or elections to try to avert failure — because low-income countries generally struggle with huge undertakings that involve millions of people.
The writer, Musaazi Namiti, is a journalist and formerAl Jazeera digital editor in charge of the Africa desk
[email protected] @kazbuk
