Of Coffee With Census

If you were having coffee with me I would welcome you to these my tangle of words and tell you that you must make the small things count… which is why I think I am outchea daydreaming how to teach mathematics to a colony of ants…

(not that I was particularly good at maths in fact back in school I rather hated strongly disliked the subject and couldn’t see the practicality of some of the concepts in real life situations….) But just because one cannot find or understand the correlation between things doesn’t mean that a connection does not exist… as they say absence of proof is not evidence of absence.

If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that under direction of Statutory Instrument 265 of 2019 and as amended by the Statutory Instrument 205 of 2021 Zimbabwe will be conducting a census of its population from the period of 21 April 2022 to 30 April 2022, with 20 April being referred to as the Census Night. Traditionally a census is conducted in Zimbabwe every ten years, the last one was in 2012, the one before that in 2002, and in 1992 moving in a ten year arithmetic progression.  

“Where were you on the night of 20^th April?”

That’s one of the first questions that you get asked… followed by whom else slept at this residence on the night in question. I gather that having a reference point for census night makes it “easy” to account for people. What follows is about close to an hour of interviewing with a Census Enumerator going through a questionnaire which has questions ranging from marital status down to the number of people who reside at your address and of course where you were during the last Census.

The questions followed a somewhat broad spectrum and to one without a prior awareness that it was a Population and Housing Census they would come across as a bit weird even invasive…  Why would you want to know how old my mum was when she married my dad?

Is the Census Questionaire in the public domain?
Cause some of them questions though… 😅

anyway we been counted have you ? pic.twitter.com/iePOSmdVyX

— ~B 🇿🇼 (@Beatonm5) April 24, 2022

Well apart from finding out the demographics according to a spokesperson of ZimStat: “the Census has several modules which include functionality, immigrations, mortality, education, labour force and housing characteristics.” When the exercise is completed, the government will have a comprehensive understanding of the employment situation, access to basic services and people’s standards of living.

One commendable thing about the exercise is how they embraced paperless enumeration, using the traditional paper methods meant the process took almost 2 years to get results and now within 6 months the full results will be out, while preliminary ones will be released by mid-year. 

Now if only the seeming efficiency of the census process could translate into facets of our everyday life… but alas, every day one wakes to enquire about the rate of the United States Dollar to the Zimbabwean Dollar as if it’s a patient on life support and you are bracing for that midnight phone call…

If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that in what’s been a busy past week for the Central Bank woke up to a Press Statement in response to a paper by the Confederation Of Zimbabwe Industry on the currency situation.

I hadn’t read the paper they were responding to but the response by the Reserve Bank made me look up the paper in question to see what exactly these captains of industry had to say…  While what they had to say had merit to it, I did take it as; imagine asking a bunch of lions how they can eat more antelope… and the antelope are the everyday consumers. Check below for the CZI Paper:

CZI Paper On The Deteriorating Currency Situation In Zimbabwe.

If you were having coffee with me I would tell you bread has gone up (again), if you recall from my last post I mentioned how the new $100 Zimbabwean note could not buy a loaf of bread, well now you need close to four of those bad boys to buy a loaf of bread… Perhaps one of the questions in the Census should have been how many meals do people eat a day or maybe a trust index on the democratic process to see how much faith the people have in their government… I mean if they wanted to know whether I had a radio or not, they could also use that opportunity to better understand their population but maybe they should let still waters be.

What’s the standard of life when some people live in areas where just small small rain and the rivers flood making them inaccessible.. My last coffee share was on Bridges and I have crossed a few more bridges interesting ones; I took the time to enjoy the scenery… that’s what counts.

Whats been happening in your neck of the woods?

~B