Mr Charles Onyango-Obbo
On May 10, Uganda will have a population census. Sometimes it stumbles, but counting people is something Uganda does quite well when it gets down to it.
The Uganda census is also not the hot political potato it is in some. Nigeria struggles with censuses, and when it does a rare one, as it did in 2023, no one believes it. One reason is that the census is a basis for divvying out goodies and money to the federal states, and everyone wants to lie about their numbers so they can get a larger slice. Corruption underlies it. If your state has five million people, and you bump up their count to 10 million by manipulating the census, it means state politicians get to eat all of the allocation for the ghost five million people – plus half of the vote for the real five million.
In Somalia, it is clan politics. A lot of political power and groceries in the country are distributed based on clans, with the largest clans getting a lion’s share. The incentive is for everyone to overcount their clan, and if they have power, to undercount rival clans.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, they haven’t had a census worth the name in a generation. Africa’s Island states are the best-run nations on the continent, but Madagascar hasn’t had one in ages.
The government has probably done something with the last census data, and it’s only the “enemies of development” who don’t see it.
However, there were many stories that one could glean. Based on the figures from 2014, it was projected that this would be the regional split of the population by 2020: Central, Area 61,403 square kilometres (11,562,900); Eastern, Area 39,479 sq. km. (10,836,500); Northern, Area 85,392 sq. km. (8,606,300); Western, Area 55,277 sq. km. (10,577,900).
Some clever fellows from the World Bank in an article entitled “The demographic boom: An explainer on Uganda’s population trends” on February 18, 2021, on the Bretton Wood institution’s blog, noted that; “The population of Uganda, currently estimated at 46 million, will at least double between 2020 and 2060, reaching 104 million people. From a population density comparable to that of Italy today, Uganda will surpass India’s current population density of 455 people per square kilometre by 2055.
“This growth in population will also be accompanied by a significant shift from rural to urban areas. In 2020, about 34 million people are estimated to be living in rural areas of the country, while urban centres hold approximately 11 million people, close to 25 percent of the population…by 2060 Uganda’s urban population will surpass its rural population, with estimates of 53 million living in urban centres and 51 in rural areas. Notably, much of the growth in urban populations will come from rural to urban migration.”
Many things are striking if one brings all these trends and data together. Central, Eastern and Western Uganda are virtually tied in their population sizes. But Northern Uganda is something else. Considering that the region knew only wars and massacres for 33 years, until about 2004, it is impressive that as of 2020 it would be only 1,971,600 people shy of Western, for example. Field Marshal Idi Amin carried out pogroms in Acholi and Lango for seven years between 1971 and late 1978; the Second Coming of the Milton/UPC government between 1981 and 1985 laid waste to parts of West Nile (and most of Luwero). From President Yoweri Museveni and the ruling NRM’s run from 1986 to 2004, in the war and slaughter by both sides of the people in the north, the region was pummelled for 18 years into the Stone Age.
With the post-war population boom and the tendency for grinding poverty to produce many children, Northern Uganda could be the most populous Ugandan region by the 2034 census
But, there is a flip side. Because it is the largest and least populated region today, beyond the specific issue of the Balalo, it is natural, and inevitable, that the rest of us will descend on its lands. It’s where there is space.
That population density the World Bank chaps wrote of, is hell in Eastern. The people are packed in like sardines, especially in the belt from Bugisu to Busoga.
A sizeable part of the migration, especially to Kampala and its surrounding districts will come from this sardine tin, and the west, which is also quite squeezed. But the Central folks won’t move. The rest will continue to settle on top of them or drive them to the margins, and the contradictions will become mega.
The big deal is not going to be what this year’s census says. It is what comes after. For the president of the day, it is a nightmare, yes. But also, if he was one for grand history, an opportunity to undertake one of Africa’s greatest feats of socio-economic engineering.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist,
writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3
