Controversy over inclusion of tribal identity in census

• The question of tribe in the forthcoming national population census has put government officials and donors on a collision course after the officials defied the donors who have demanded that the question be struck out of the questionnaire
• Government ignores donor concerns that ethnic question in August population census will derail efforts towards national healing

A spirited attempt to block a census question that would make it possible for Kenyans to know the number of people in each of the country’s 42 tribes has been rejected even as it emerged that the government was planning to deploy monitors to help prevent rigging of the August national census.

Donors wanted the question dropped from the official census questionnaire on grounds that it will frustrate efforts towards national healing after last year’s bloody post-election violence.

The donors argued that the question will evoke memories of the killings, many of which were attributed to tensions between tribes following the disputed presidential election. Some 1,300 people were killed while 350,000 were displaced in the violence.

Ministry of Planning officials have decided to press on with the questionnaire bearing the tribe question, arguing that fears that it was too emotive were overblown.

Kenya National Bureau of Statistics director general Anthony Kilele confirmed the donor concerns.

“They thought it might not be good for us to ask people about their tribes when they have not healed (from the deadly post-election violence),” he said.

But Mr Kilele said the donors’ fears had been proved wrong since the question had been answered well during a pilot census survey ahead of the Sh7.3 billion national count.

“We have established that all Kenyans are comfortable with answering the tribe question,” he said.

“The data (on tribe) is of good statistical value,” he said. “It will allow us to know better who we are, rather than relying on generalities.”

The donors had argued that it would be difficult for the results to be trusted if some of the results on the tribe numbers were disputed.

Their case was based on the reasoning that politicians and their communities would want to show that their tribes were more populous than the rest, in a bid to benefit more from devolved funds such as Constituency Development Fund, which are calculated on the basis of the number of people in each constituency.

So great are “rigging” fears that the government recently called on interested international and local firms to apply to monitor the exercise.

No census has been overseen by independent monitors in Kenya’s history, meaning stakes in this year’s exercise are high especially coming so soon after the controversial 2007 General Election.

The Kenya 2009 Population and Housing Census will be held on the night of August 24/25.

Tensions over the numbers of each tribe are not new. In 1999, the question was asked but data on the findings was not made public.

It is also expected that results of the census may guide the creation of new constituencies ahead of the 2012 General Election.

The donors’ concerns are similar to those recently raised by former Kenya National Commission on Human Rights chairman Maina Kiai who called for postponement of the census on grounds that the “high political temperatures” in the country were unsuitable for collecting population data.

There were also fears that there could be “rigging” in the exercise, with people deliberately distorting the count to inflate figures of their regions “to benefit from higher allocation of devolved funds and get new districts and constituencies”.