By Abass Jalloh
Statistics Sierra Leone (Stats-SL) has said in a statement that payments are being made to field staff that worked during the 2021 Mid-Term Population and Housing Census and have successfully completed and synched their data.
“We have paid up to 90% of our field staff that has been verified using our server information,” a statement from Stats-SL, dated 5th August 2022, reads.
According to the statement, the remaining ten percent (10%) is a mixture of those who worked satisfactorily but presented wrong bank accounts and bank account numbers. Others affected had a mismatch of names or finished less than thirty percent (30%) of their workloads.
For those who worked 30% and below and then abandoned the work, Stats-SL stated that they would not pay those people. “This is because they had already collected 30% payment and training allowances from Stats-SL at the start of the work,” the statement continues, noting that the remaining seventy percent (70%) payment will be for those who replaced them and did the remainder of their work.
The move by Stats-SL came in the wake of continued reports of a lack of payment to enumerators who were hired for the census.
In June, the Deputy Statistician General, Andrew Bob Johnny, told a press conference at the Ministry of Information and Communications that they were trying to fulfill some outstanding payments by retrieving the remaining digital tablets from the workers.
Johnny disclosed that President Julius Maada Bio had paid over thirty billion Leones [Le 30,000,000,000] to ensure that they fulfil all remaining payments of all staff. “The process is being done; we have paid over eighteen billion Leones [Le 18,000,000,000] so far,” he stated at the time.
The total national result of Sierra Leone’s population based on the 2021 midterm census is estimated at seven million, five hundred and forty-one thousand, six hundred and forty-one (7,541,641).
Many discrepancies came up disregarding the result, including the APC Secretary-General who asserted that they would not accept the provisional result as presented and would oppose any attempt to the delimitation of boundaries, adding that they deliberately told their supporters not to participate in the census.
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