85,000 miss jobs as census is postponed

By Conan Busingye

With the postponement of the enumeration process of the country’s national census, more than 80,000 Ugandans have lost out on employment.

Over 80,000 enumerators were to be recruited before July to move from house to house. Each of them was supposed to cover 60 to 70 households. In addition, 13,000 supervisors were due to be recruited to oversee the enumeration exercise.

However, the fi nance ministry has announced that the census will be postponed due to inadequate funding in the 2012/2013 fi nancial year. The census will instead be held next year in August.

Nearly 200 census offi cials, who had already been hired before the postponement, will have their contracts revised, according to the executive director of the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) Dr. J.B. Male-Mukasa.

During a press briefi ng at the UBOS offi ces, Male-Mukasa said the organisation will consult with the Solicitor General and Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets Authority, over census-related contracts and tenders that were already awarded. “We will see if we can halt, re-negotiate, or postpone some of these contracts,” Male- Mukasa said.

He also explained that the postponement will raise the cost of the census from sh140b to sh149b.

This, he said, is because some of the activities will have to be revisited such as mapping of some of the areas.