Man threatens to sue Statistical Service
Alhaji Iddrisu Bature, an opinion leader of Maamobi, has issued an ultimatum to the Statistical Service to, either withdraw the current document on Ghana's population and do a better job, or face action in court.
He pointed out that the current figure of 18.8 million is misleading, because many people have been left out and would, therefore, be detrimental to planning for the nation's overall.
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Alhaji Bature, who is also a social scientist and commentator, issued the ultimatum in an interview in Accra. He was reacting to the release of the final results of the census conducted by the Ghana Statistical Service which, among other things, put the nation's current population at 18.8 million.
According to Alhaji Bature, there are complaints from substantial numbers of people across the country to the effect that they were not counted during the recent enumeration exercise.
"Indeed so serious is the error of very many people having been left out of the counting process that if one took a random sample of 10 people in many parts of the country, one was very likely to get three or four people confirming that they were not counted during the last exercise.” This, he said, convinced him that a good job had not been done of this important national exercise and therefore, its result would inevitably be flawed.
"Besides that I was not counted during the recent population exercise, and as many as 10 people in my house were also left out. This together with similar stories all over the place raises serious doubt about the validity, credibility and therefore reliability of the current census results," he stressed.
Alhaji Bature also queried the religious breakdown of the census, which put Christians at 69 per cent of the population, Muslims at 15.6 per cent and traditionalist at 8.5 per cent and said it was weighted unfairly against Muslims and Traditionalists.
"A proper and more objective count and compilation would without any shred of doubt in my wind reveal larger percentages for both Muslims and traditionalist, both of which put together would out number Christians".
"Again, if it is accepted that the majority of people in the rural areas, which the report agrees still constitutes the majority of the country's population are traditionalists, how come that they (traditionalist) are only 8.5 per cent of the population," he wondered.
The Mamobi opinion leader observed that the resort to unreliable data by government for planning purposes is replete with disastrous consequences.
"In this particular case government would be thinking of about only 18 million people when the needs, concerns and aspirations of the people are being planned only for the true picture to be a larger population with change in the structure and composition than we are currently made to believe" he stressed.
Alhaji Bature called on the government to take a second and a harder look at the census report and adopt more innovative and modern means of ascertaining the true population of the country.
"I guess in this respect that the government should adopt the national insurance system used in other nations.
This mechanism would not only enable all citizens to acquire the card and therefore easy to determine their number but also be useful in other important national events such as voting, health insurance, business transaction and others", he counseled.