Soon after the release of the 2019 population census results on Monday, I met an old friend unwinding with a cup of tea.
I quickly joined him with a topic opener to pick his mind. “Did you hear that we are now 47.5 million Kenyans?” I asked.
His rejoinder was sharp and swift, “So what?”
“Just that,” I responded. “Our population is confirmed. We are not 45 million anymore.”
Down the conversation, he got more cynical, but the cynicism made more and more sense. We are 47.5 million, so what?”
The figure has now settled in our minds. Even more topical is the number 23.5 million for men and 24 million for women.
From the Media, to politicians and political analysts, the talk has narrowed down to how the numbers will apply in the 2022 General Election.
How the figures will be combined, added, subtracted and balanced in the 2022 equation. How regional numbers will be rented and leased out to other regions.
Perhaps also how numbers will get resource allocation—but that sounds secondary.
One would think the census was a count of voters, commissioned by political players. Every digit in the results has a political meaning assigned to it.
The debate is all about the tyranny of numbers at the ballot with the census report seen as a blue print on how votes should determine the election outcome.
Even those doubting and vowing to challenge the results are only speaking from the fears that the numbers will have their strongholds scrapped, rendering them redundant.
Is there anything else worth picking from the census report? Has the country asked itself that question? Do we need more details as to who constitutes the 47.5 million?
Those extra figures don’t seem to matter for now despite being crucial. Probably, the most critical number out of the 47.5 is that of those aged 18 and above—the voting mass.
Yet a census ought to inform the citizenry more comprehensively. How many professionals do we have in the Coastal region for example?
How many doctors have we trained since the last census and how many more do we need to attend to the 47.5 million Kenyans?
According to World Health Organisation, the ration of doctors to a population should be 1:1,000. Only a few countries like Cuba, Australia, Monaco and Spain have attained that ration. In Kenya we require at least 47,500 if we are to meet that threshold. How many do we have and is that a matter of concern, besides the political mathematics?
Does anyone know how many plumbers and artisans we could get in the Central counties and how many more we may need? Rather, has the census results informed us anything of the sort?
How many orphans are there in Nairobi? How many are in children’s homes and how many are not? How many homes for the aged do we have in Kenya? How many are state owned and how many are privately run? How many street families are there in Eldoret town? Did anyone count them? Is that a worthy debate for a country battling with high poverty levels?
Do the census results reveal to us how many cases of cancer ailment we had by August 2019. How would a private researcher or one partnering with the Government in the health sector plan for interventions with the statistics?
We have 759,000 people in Nyeri County as per the results. How many of them are battling with cancer? If we needed to marshal support for the victims, would the census results come in handy. Such debates seem to have been lost as Kenyans get mesmerised with the politics of the numbers.
Beekeepers
How many farmers in Kenya are producing apples and how many are beekeepers and where are they found? Would such debate make sense alongside the debate on which tribe will support which one.
While as population figures and their distribution primarily enable a government to plan, every citizen should find intrinsic value in them.
A politician may only see votes in numbers, but an investor will see market and source of labour. An investor in education will be more interested in population distribution of children.
A poultry farmer in Limuru, Kiambu who sells all his eggs in Nairobi will pray for population explosion in the city more than in his Limuru backyard. That should be a vital material for public consumption in an Agriculture based economy.
A national census should be the ultimate confirmation of all the presumptions, half-truths and doubts entrenched in the masses about their population and their social, cultural and economic demography. Every one should find relevance in the census at individual level. Without that, we will have census results every 10 years and the question which will keep popping up is “so what?”
Mr Wahome is an advocate of the High Court
