SINCE IT WAS Conducted last December 2022 by the Liberia Institute of Statistics and Geo-Information Service (LISGIS), provisional results of the 2022 Census were on Wednesday, February 22, released to the public during an official and well-attended ceremony held at the Monrovia City Hall.
THE POPULATION OF Liberia now, as far as the provisional results of the recent census are concerned, is 5.2 million. This is an increment of 1.78 million human beings since 2008 when the last census results said Liberians were 3.4 million.
IT WILL BE disingenuous on our part if we dare fail to join other Liberians and the International Community to congratulate LISGIS and the hundreds of individuals, who served as enumerators, for such a remarkable achievement.
HOWEVER, JUDGING FROM the many controversies that were associated with the census process, including enumerators’ lackadaisical attitude, protests and boycotts in many areas across the country in demand of their benefits, the provisional results as have been announced, seem unrealistic and may likely backfire.
BELIEVE IT OR not, public scrutiny and doubts over the results have already flared up in many quarters, particularly where several hundreds or even thousands of citizens were not counted due to widespread disillusionment among enumerators across the country.
FOR A CLASSIC example, in our office of a population size of nearly fifteen persons, almost everybody said they were not counted because the enumerators did not reach or cover their respective communities.
IF ALL OF these people we are talking about here live in communities in central Monrovia and its immediate environs, what’s about citizens living in faraway communities and counties such as Grand Kru and Maryland? We doubt it many of the citizens in these areas were actually visited and truly counted.
AND GUESS WHAT? There were hundreds of census workers or enumerators that never had or were given the requisite logistics and financial resources to reach villages and hamlets to enumerate citizens there.
THIS IS WHY it is our conviction that the provisional results of our recent National Census are insincere and unrealistic.
COINCIDENTALLY, THE 2022 National Census was conducted as we approach the 2023 crucial national elections this October. This means the outcomes or data collected during the just-ended national census must be sincere and realistic.
THIS IS ESSENTIAL because census data is used to decide how many seats in the House of Representatives each county receives, etc.
THE LEGISLATURE and local governments also rely on census data to help draw boundaries for congressional, state legislative and local districts to make sure they are equally populated. Students of demography call it districting.
SO LET’S FACE it, can a national census that was half hardly conducted serve the purpose mentioned above? Obviously not.
REMEMBER, WHAT IS not done properly, is not done at all. From our observation and the controversies that accompanied the census process, it was not properly conducted. This is why we think the provisional census results that put our population at 5.2 million, are absolutely unrealistic. We don’t however, question the praises that some of our development partners have lavished on the census.
