One journalist’s night out with census enumerators

The assignment that the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (Ubos) laid out for its legions of enumerators to execute on the so-called Census Night on Thursday appeared clear out—take stock of a floating population. This was a sweeping term used to describe anyone that the Census Night found outside a domestic residence at the stroke of midnight. Sex workers, night travellers, street children, market vendors, and other homeless people constituted the floating population.

As Ubos and Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) finalised the preparations for the kick-off of the exercise across the five divisions of Kampala, at midnight, I was part of the journalists given a ringside seat. Nakawa Division headquarters is where I was to be stationed. The division arguably commands the biggest population and parishes not just in the capital, but across the country.

Trouble in paradise?

While there, I found nearly 2,000 youth—recruited to work as census enumerators and supervisors—grumbling over nonpayment of their transport refund. They also demanded, I would soon establish, full payment of their nine-day training allowances. Capping the growing litany of demands was the Shs50,000 daily allowance for the census that at the stroke of midnight commenced in the wee hours of Friday morning.

If I needed any indication that the country was in for a long day, there it was. As the morning mist started to descend in the dusk, the census enumerators got hungrier. And angrier.

Soon, tempers started to flare. Sensing looming danger, Menya Micheal Mabir, the head of the census exercise at Nakawa Division, excused himself from the rowdy youths who had invited themselves into his office. He relocated to one of the tree-shades in the gardens. While there, he made a few phone calls.

Crisis averted?

Shortly after, Mr Ronald Balimwezo, the Nakawa East lawmaker; Mr Paul Mugambe, the Nakawa Mayor; Sheikh Kasim Kamugisha, the Resident City Commissioner; Mr Nicholas Arinaitwe, the Nakawa National Resistance Movement chairman; and Moses Tashobya, the the District Internal Security Officer, appeared at the Division headquarters to convince the youthful enumerators to continue with the important exercise. They assured the enumerators that all the money they had been promised would be paid.

As 11.30pm clocked, I headed to Nakawa Division headquarters and found a handful of supervisors waiting for deployment. Nakawa Division straddles from Port Bell Luzira, Naguru Go-down, Kyanja, and areas of Namanve. Hardly your average small beer.

With a few minutes remaining until the kickoff time of the exercise, this big division, remarkably, had only two pick-up trucks. These were meant to drop off the enumerators to the various areas where they were supposed to count the floating population. When asked which areas they had mapped to find the floating population, Mr Menya said they had not thought of any specific areas.

Mr Menya also told Sunday Monitor that they were planning to send teams to Nakawa market to count the people who sleep there. After, next stops would be Luzira, Naguru Go Down, Ntinda and parts of Bukoto. It sounded reasonable enough. So as the team to count the market vendors was dispatched, I followed them.

At sea

At around 12:50am when one group set off for the market, we found many traders offloading and buying produce. The enumerators, however, bypassed them. They instead went and converged at Shell Nakawa. According to Robert Asaba, a supervisor at Naguru Parish, who was heading the group, they converged at the fuel station to wait for security which was supposed to be given to them by officer-in-charge of Naguru Police Station.

When one of the enumerators asked him how they were going to enter the data into the tablets, which hadn’t yet been synchronised, he told them to use plain paper and the data would be transferred to the computers after. He pulled out money to buy pens for his team members.

Feeling energised and ready to hit the road, Nicholas Muzanyi, an enumerator who had mapped out the mentally challenged people living around Nakawa Market Area, briefed his boss about their locations. He said the majority of them sleep inside the UAP leisure gardens across the market.

Mr Muzanyi advised the boss that as they waited for the police boss to arrive, they could start counting the mentally challenged people. His boss objected. He asked him to explain how he anticipated extracting information from a mentally challenged person who has just woken up. Mr Asaba consequently told his team that when they find one such person, they should rather name the street where they found one and draw a map showing the exact location and estimate the person’s age.

Hide-and-seek

At Ntinda Trading Centre, another area where they were supposed to count sex workers and street children, Milly Nantongo, the supervisor in charge of 19 villages in Ntinda, said when her team converged at Petro City fuel station at 11pm, the owners of brothels and bars located opposite the fuel station started closing their shops and went home. By 1:40am, the sex workers they had expected to count, had already left the place.

As for the Karamojong street children, it became a cat and mouse game as the children kept dashing to the opposite direction whenever the enumerators tried to find them. Asked how they intended to identify the sex workers, Conrad Kakeeto, the Ntinda supervisor, said they had abandoned the idea of counting the sex workers. They would instead leave questionnaires in the hotels, lodges and guest houses so that they (sex workers) would find them and fill them up. 

Mr Kakeeto, however, said even with that method, they were still faced with a challenge of capturing their data.

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