Boundaries review could jolt national census

[Photo: Courtesy]

Last week, I analysed the politics of the boundaries review and promised to look at the politics of the forthcoming census this week. Every 10 years, the country carries out a national census, counting the number of people living in Kenya and assessing their socio-economic status. While this process is often presented as an non-controversial, technical process, census are known to be politically charged processes. Nonetheless, this time round, the census is likely to be more politically-charged because of the boundaries review which is happening at around the same time and which depends partly on the outcome of the census.

World over, censuses and other processes of gathering and analysing demographic data are often highly political processes across the world. In the developed countries, news of “minority“ populations increasing faster rate than the “dominant“ groups gives rise to moral panics about declining cultural and political power of the dominant group. But such issues are even more pertinent in the developing countries where Judith Butler’s view that how states organise populations places some people at a higher risk of death than others, is real and material. The violent contestations of census processes and outcomes in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, are well known.