By Alpha Abu
The Director of Communications and Public Relations at Statistics Sierra Leone, Samuel Ansumana says the level of compliance to the Mid- Term Population and Housing Census has been high. Speaking to Politico he said a higher percentage of the population has been counted and that only a smaller proportion is left.
“We have a lot of people that have been counted across the country but this time we don’t want to be talking about percentages but we can tell for sure that we’ve had over 65 percent of the target population that has been counted”, he said.
He would not be drawn on whether the turnout surprised them in light of the contentious nature surrounding the holding of the census itself.
“We know there were people who were waging a campaign for people not to participate. But we know for sure that at the end of the day common sense prevailed. People are there who actually wanted to be counted. In fact, through the HelpLine that we set up, lots of people are calling us as we do the mopping up. In areas that have not been counted, they are calling us that they want to be counted. We knew at the end of the day that people will cooperate though we cannot hide the fact that we had lots of resistance from people in several communities and districts across the country”, Ansumana stated.
He however said from the data they’re seeing, many people have been counted.
Ansumana said they are not putting up a specific timeline for the mopping up exercise to end because they know of areas that have not been counted and they wanted to count as many people as possible and as available.
He admitted their enumerators during the course of the census encountered challenges of rejection, deployment, late payments, and timeliness but expressed delight that they’ve been able to surmount most of them.
The mid-term census announced by the government and which began on the 10th December 2021, was opposed from the onset by a group of opposition parties including the main opposition All People’s Congress (APC). Some notable figures in the APC circulated video and audio messages on social media calling on their supporters to boycott the headcount as well as in an official press statement. The World Bank days before the commencement of the census, stopped its financing of the exercise, citing some concerns, especially the technical readiness of Statistics Sierra Leone to carry out the process.
Independent sources say people have since been largely complying with the census especially as the days wore on.
Copyright © 2022 Politico Online (10/01/22)
