Kibaki warns Kenyans over census

• President: Cheating will be detected and dealt with accordingly.

• The Sh7.4 billion exercise will be carried out beginning the night of August 24.

• Census will shape government policy on water, housing, sanitation, employment and poverty alleviation.

President Kibaki has warned Kenyans against giving false information during the August census.

The warning comes just as constituencies gear to receive the additional devolved funds from the Treasury as stipulated in this year’s budget.

He noted that data from some areas may be manipulated to increase the allocation of devolved funds and warned that “cheating will be detected and dealt with accordingly.”

The President spoke on Friday at the official launch of the 25-day countdown to the national population and housing census held at Nairobi’s Kenyatta International Conference Centre.

He appealed to the public to give detailed information to help boost national planning “while at the same time upholding peace, unity and national integration.”

This means that people will be obliged to state their tribes as asked in the census questionnaire for them to heed the President’s call to provide information that is “comprehensive enough”.

He asked politicians to “respect” the process and called on church leaders and the civil society to help sensitise the public on the importance of the process.

Friday's exercise was a major publicity event for the census exercise in a bid to woo public support to “cooperate fully” with the enumerators during the exercise.

Deputy Prime Minister Musalia Mudavadi asked the Ministry of Planning to make public the result of the one-week exercise.

“It is important that this time the census is made public when the data is ready,” he said, adding that information from the last two censuses was not formally released.

The secrecy in the data, he said, undermined the “integrity” of the census process.

The Planning Ministry has once been criticised for falsifying the poverty index --a key indicator in the allocation of the constituency development fund.

Preliminary results are expected on December 31 Planning minister Wycliffe Oparanya said, but the final data will be known three months later.

The theme for this year’s census is Counting our People for the Implementation of Vision 2030.

The Sh7.4 billion exercise to be carried out beginning the night of August 24 is meant to “eliminate inequality” in the allocation of resources.

The process is crucial for the government to monitor progress in the journey towards the 2015 deadline of the Millennium Development Goals.

This time round, Mr Oparanya said, pastoralists and internally displaced people will make the head count as the government has provided extra money for relief food and water.

This is an incentive to have the pastoralists stay in one locality over the census week.