The Politics of Counting Africans
blurb:isstoday21Oct09
21 October 2009: The Politics of Counting Africans
Dr. Annie Barbara Chikwanha, AHSI/ISS, Addis Ababa
The recently concluded Kenyan census forces us to query and attempt to comprehend the value of numbers. Figures are not everything but they are essential for planning purposes at all levels. They form the basis of how and why we build clinics and schools in certain areas, locate dams in specific regions, and increase and upgrade our roads. Counting is a simple practice when considered conceptually, but the case of African population counts has in some cases been quite complicated, contentious, and just like everywhere else, socially and politically consequential.
Cornell University experts Ann Martin and Michael Lynch point out that counting is always troubled and contested. The way in which counting is done can be used to expose the numeropolitics of counting. It implies how categories will be defined and how specific numbers will be assigned according to some logic. Intrinsic to the process is the notion of surveillance that is based on figures and this is difficult where fragile networks of trust dominate such as in countries where politics is violently contested.
The resistance shown by some citizens across the continent in revealing their ‘numerical status’ at the family level can be attributed to both superstition and real fear of either inevitable political marginalization and manipulation. Some citizens were unwilling to divulge the number of children they had in the recent Kenyan census. This is not peculiar to Kenya only, in Malawi too, asking the number of children one has is taboo and one never gets the correct answer, yet both many scientific and nonscientific activities involve practices of counting.
The memories on when the number of cattle one owned was used to determine African ownership of cattle are still fresh and the population policies that were meant to control population growth also haunt our generation that still counts its successes in ‘quantities’. First of all, censuses are like African funerals-they expose one’s poverty. And we tend to mask our poverty with the little that we have, but when a well dressed stranger comes into your home and asks intrusive questions, our guard is raised immediately.
Usually, statisticians do their work independently, away from the prying eyes and scrutiny of politicians and opinionates. But these aren't normal times in many African countries. Incumbent regime survival very often compels governments to play games to disguise the effects of constituency boundaries on desired electoral outcomes and this is fairly straightforward deviousness. The redrawing of electoral boundaries prior to each election is always based theoretically on ‘population movements, yet no other developments seem to be based on figures which can be used to substantiate need. The multiparty elections in particular trigger such memories during censuses. Electoral fraud is behind much of the constituency boundary disputes that politicians have used to hang onto power. Earlier on, the former rebels of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) dismissed the Sudanese census results as gravely wrong, contending that the total for Southerners was too low. The data was not considered to be of much value for anything else either as one SPLM official argued: "Well, the census is supposed to draw the map of the human resources and sustainable development for Sudan, but unfortunately we don't think it is going to be useful for these purposes,".
In 2005 in Nigeria, The National Council of State, a body which includes the president, the 36 state governors and former heads of state, contested the counting process itself. The form for the 2005 census included questions about the religion or ethnic group of persons surveyed and the national council was against this. This came after Ahmed Makarfi, governor of Kaduna State in northern Nigeria, threatened to mount a boycott of the census if these issues were not dealt with in the questionnaire. Resource allocation by the central government had to do with many of the problems. The number of parliamentary representatives which a region can nominate, and the amount of money it receives from central government are largely determined by the population of that region. As a result, many communities are alleged to have inflated their census figures during previous headcounts, prompting legal challenges by groups which felt disadvantaged by census outcomes. Some critics complained that the census data has no value because the problem with Nigeria is that there is a tendency to place more premium on using census data for revenue allocation than on planning for sustainable development.
So, how then do we count people against a background of non-basic service delivery and the 2007 post-election violence? An angry population, shamed by generational poverty and insensitive bureaucrats, can hit back at such times when officials want to do what appears to be routine exercises to the public. Unresponsiveness on the part of the counted and inaccurate information can often lead to wrong numerical outcomes. In addition, cultural barriers, intrusive questions and the question of who is counting who all add to the complexities of counting people in Africa. To get accurate data, census cartographers need to have access to current maps of sufficient levels of scale and detail and in most African countries such maps are either very old and in some cases, they do not exist at all. As for Kenya, the North Eastern region is hostile territory with no road network and armed escorts are necessary to get anywhere safely. We thus raise the question of whether there has been any value added from counting ‘the people’ in the previous censuses.
Experts warn that although censuses attempt to collect demographic, economic and social data pertaining to all persons in a country, such data collection is never achieved in practice as there is always an element of under-representation. The under-representation of the population in censuses, however, varies from country to country depending on the level of statistical sophistication of the country concerned and we add, accessibility of all areas. In much of Africa, such access is determined by the seasons.
Accurate statistical data adds value to the much needed multi-sectoral approach in planning. Mapping in this way provides some indication of the development direction of a nation: eg, number of additional jobs essential for accommodating new entrants into the labour market whilst taking into account existing jobs. Likewise, the housing sector requires numbers of the projected demand for housing and electricity due to natural increase or migration and this to helps to mitigate looming environmental disasters due to population movements.
