Author: Alan Tacca. PHOTO/FILE
Halfway into the 10 days originally set for the 2024 census, I expressed the fear that the exercise was doomed.
I just could not imagine the thousands of Ugandan officials involved applying the dedication, coordination and thoroughness required to turn out a performance above the hypothetical pass mark of 30 percent.
This was of course depressing, although a better performance by the national statistics bureau would not necessarily bring hope.
In a normal society, accurate demographic details are essential. Governments use those references when formulating policies and determining the kind and timing of actions needed to make those policies work.
Few people would dispute that. The problem is that Uganda is not exactly a normal country. Government policies and (especially) actions seem so arbitrary, and often at the prompting of one man, that many demographic would-be-signals are rendered irrelevant.
Sometimes the action chosen is the exact opposite of what the demographic record would suggest as the appropriate action.
For instance, if census figures of population and poverty levels suggested that the number of ministers, MPs and district political functionaries should be drastically reduced, you can trust the NRM rulers to increase them to serve a narrow selfish/partisan purpose.
If population distribution showed that it is Wakiso District that should get more MPs (after the wrong policy of increasing their number is adopted), you can trust the NRM rulers to look elsewhere, searching for areas supporting NRM and splitting those into more constituencies instead.
In short, the intelligent citizen clearly understood the value of an accurate census. But the same citizen also knew that after the NRM government had overseen the plunder of the billions of shillings allocated to the task, it would probably not have much use for the census figures as a guide to a positive national agenda.
That is why many Ugandans are not bothered whether there was even a census at all.
Paradoxically, if the credibility of the ruling NRM stands to be damaged by a botched census, the same NRM is the main beneficiary of a botched census. Why?
Well, apart from the plunder of the resources involved, in which NRM honchos could have benefited any-which-way ordinary people can only guess at, there was a mountain-sized problem of numbers that the NRM had deliberately created only a few weeks before the national census.
After just a few days of a party membership registration exercise that the public was reported to have largely ignored, the NRM came out with a claim that it had registered 18 (yes, eighteen) million members.
Now, between Census 2014 and Census 2024, Uganda’s population was estimated to have grown to about 47 million people, including under-16-year-olds.
In 2021, the entire voting block was around 11 million, regardless of party affiliation. Even with the magic of the Electoral Commission’s Byabakamaesque mathematics, the 2021 General Election returned President Museveni and the NRM to power with only five or six million votes, with the Opposition being allocated over three million votes.
If you feed all those figures in the brain of a bird, the bird will tell you that either the figure of 18 million NRM members (in 2024) is a fiction, or the population of Uganda (in 2024) is at least 90 million people.
Problem: No ‘patriotic’ census official can recommend a bird as a source of common sense. It is much better to stage an exercise that is ‘technically’ discredited from the beginning.
For this level-headedness, every official working on the Census 2024 project should get the coveted Katonga medal.
Mr Alan Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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