When you have a clueless
leader who put equally clueless people in positions of responsibility, you
should expect the chaos and retrogression.
My computer science lecturer – yes, we had (main frame) computers then – who was fond of saying if you feed the computer junk, expect junk as
output. In short, all you get at the end
of the day is GIGO meaning garbage in, garbage out.
That is what has
happened to our Statistics Department now called Gambia Bureau of Statistics. It's not the name but ultimately what a government and the country need is a reliable set of data that will
help public officials and private sector operators plan and implement public-
and private-sector policies better.
The economy runs on
good, reliable data. In fact, the country runs on good reliable data.
And when all we get is Jammeh saying that there are 700,000 Senegalese in
the country in one breathe and claiming that the figure is 950,000 in the
other, our country is in a fix. The former Senegalese Ambassador to The
Gambia disputed Jammeh's figures outright as something he pulled out of a
rabbit's hat. There are less than 15,000 Senegalese with consular card,
meaning they are registered with the Senegal Embassy.
In comes the
Statistician General - Director of Statistics - Mr. Nyakassi Sanyang who
declared that the official population figure is 1.9 million of which 100,000
are non-Gambians residing in the country. If Yaya Jammeh is to be
believed, then Mr. Sanyang has a huge task of having to locate the missing
850,000 Senegalese and also must explain where have all the Nigerians and
Bissau Guinean gone; not to mention other non-Gambian residents.
Mr.
Sanyang's other headache is to convince the Bakau parliamentarian who claims
that there are more than 100,000 foreigners resident in the Gambia. He
directed the head honcho of statistic to check with the Immigration "for
the factual figure" according to the Daily Observer. We will let you know
who comes out on top on this one.
It turned out that
another set of legislators are using a population figure of their own.
For them to stop clinging to the 1.7 million figure as the total population, they'd
have to be convinced by the expert statisticians. What Mr. Sanyang is certain of is that the 1.7 million figure
did not from his department. "I don't know where it came from"
, he retorted. But he agrees with the parliamentarian who claims that the
100,000 non-Gambian resident figure is suspect even though his department
collected and published the figure.
One can continue making
fun at these serious issues if the viability of The Gambia was not at stake. As intimated previously, without reliable data the country cannot and
should not be expected to function as a normal country. We are seeing
that now. Nothing works in The Gambia, practically nothing.
All of the figures that
we have been referencing above are still "provisional", three years
after the 2013 Population Census. The inability of the department to
present final figures is unprecedented in the 53-year history of the Population
Census. This is the first time that the flagship publication of the
Statistics Department has failed to publish the final figures. The reason
is two-fold : politics and personnel.
The Statistician General
has alluded to the second but stayed mute on the first, of which he is a
product of. As part of what Information Minister Sheriff Bojang famously
referred to as Yaya Jammeh's re-engineering crusade, a tribal classification
and reassignment exercise of sorts have been going on for a very long time to
give Jammeh the permanent electoral advantage he needs. The
reclassification exercise has been going without the knowledge of the public.
The Kombo North
Constituency is particularly affected with consequential effect to the
electoral map. As a result of this exercise, the figures are not adding
up which makes data analysis an impossible task.
