By Chrispina Lois Taylor
Following weeks of acrimony, the Sierra Leone government has postponed the census scheduled for April this year, a statement from the office of the President issued late last night said. It set the new date for the end of the year.
“Following consultations with the All Political Parties Association, His Excellency the President has graciously approved the postponement of the enumeration activities of the population and housing census earlier scheduled for 4th – 17th April, 2015 to 5th – 18th December, 2015.” The statement partly reads.
While assuring that the postponement will not compromise the census data quality, the statement noted however that it will affect the timing of the results as the final results initially expected in December, 2015 would now be available by December next year.
The census had been initially intended to take place in December, 2014, but was interrupted by the Ebola outbreak.
Tuesday`s announcement followed heated debate, including in parliament last week where the minority leader was calling for the process to be better planned. Dr Bernadette Lahai also suggested the census be conducted after the 2018 general elections to ensure the credibilities of both processes.
Lahai, Member of Parliament for Constituency 13 in the Kenema district, told Politico on Tuesday that if people were questioning the credibility of Census 2015, then “we need to reverse the whole process, open it up, do neutral arbitration, proper shortlisting and redo cartography.”
But, she urged, if government could not conduct a credible census, then they could conduct it after the general elections using the 2004 census projection “as we did in the 1996, 2002 general elections and in the 2008 local government elections.”
The opposition leader said in both the 1996 and 2002 general elections the country used the population projection of the 1985 census. And in the 2008 local government elections, she said, it was the 2004 census population projection that was used, and “those elections were successful.”
The minority leader`s statement re-echoed those of her colleague opposition members in parliament who complained that the process leading to the 2015 census did not appear credible and was likely to enable the ruling party to reduce the population sizes of constituencies in the strongholds of main opposition Sierra Leone people’s Party (SLPP).
SLPP Member of Parliament Sualiho Koroma of Constituency 67 in the Bo district had said the educational qualifications of the present district census officers needed verification. MP Koroma’s criticism came after the Institute for Governance Reform (IGR), a research institute in Freetown, published a report on the 2015 census urging government to postpone the census process. The report stated that the census “has been largely subverted and its technical content compromised for political and personal gains.” It further stated that census 2015 “has no demographer and statistician” by qualification.
Also, the executive director of IGR said “government will be unreasonable to push to have a census amidst the Ebola outbreak in the country.”
Recently, the All Political Parties Association (APPA), a group representing all political parties in the country, consulted President Koroma urging him to postpone the census because of “the Ebola outbreak.”
© Politico 04/02/15
