Editorial | Clear the air on census bungle

The Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN) needs to provide a clearer explanation for the trundling national census, which, after more than four months, won’t meet its latest March 31 deadline for completion.

And no one seems to know when it will end. At least, STATIN’s head, Carol Coy, declined to commit to a new deadline when she appeared before Parliament’s standing finance committee this week, despite confirming that her agency had implemented no approaches to capture the information to speed up the process, using the existing numbers of census-takers.

Further, there didn’t seem to be many takers, even on the government’s benches, for Finance Minister Nigel Clarke’s argument that a major part of the problem was that Jamaica’s strong job market made it difficult to recruit staff for the project. Some legislators insisted that, the minister’s claim notwithstanding, there were many unemployed,but qualified young people in their constituencies who didn’t know that jobs were going abegging at STATIN.

LIKELY IMPLICATIONS

While Minister Clarke should say what the likely implications of the delay for policy formulation and execution and the project’s costs are, Ms Coy owes a full and transparent report on the dynamics within her agency that might have contributed to the problem. Further, she should be specific about what has been, or is being, done to fix them.

Censuses, head counts of residents, are conducted every decade. The previous one, which put the island’s population at just under 2.7 million, was conducted in 2011. The one that should have followed in 2021 was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The current census, on which the government will spend an estimated $2.6 billion in the 2022/23 fiscal year ending March 31, and has budgeted $1.23 billion for 2023/24, began last September. It should have been completed in December. When that date wasn’t met, the deadline was pushed back to the end of this month, which we have been told can’t be kept.

STATIN projected that it would need 7,000 people to conduct the count and capture demographic information on everyone living on the island. However, Ms Coy reported that they were only able to recruit 4,800, or 69 per cent of the requirement. The 31-per-cent shortfall, according to Minister Clarke, has been compounded by frequent turnover of staff, that is, people dropping out of the programme.

Dr Clarke’s explanation for this problem, if it is indeed true, is a bitter-sweet Jamaicans would willingly imbibe.

“The nature of the challenge has to do with the tightness in the labour market and the availability of persons to fill that role (census-takers),” the minister told his parliamentary colleagues.

SINCE RESPONDED

The government, according to the minister, has since responded by doubling the $200 per household and $400 per individual for satisfactorily completed questionnaires. This, he hoped, would allow STATIN to compete in a labour market where unemployment is 6.6 per cent.

However, there are tens of thousands of working-age Jamaicans who are outside the labour market. But, more significantly, Robert Morgan, the de facto information minister, said that the fact that STATIN was recruiting wasn’t widely known, and certainly not in the rural constituency he represents, where there were many school-leavers with the requisite education seeking jobs. That was the Government’s information man.

Julian Robinson, the shadow finance minister, who represents an urban constituency, had a similar complaint. He also questioned whether recruitment was the only problem with the project.

Mr Robinson claimed that some prospective census takers, having been trained, waited around for weeks without notification before deciding to move on.

These claims suggest a failure of communication and to appropriately price the labour component of the task, which is something that STATIN, whose job is to gather and analyse data, including of the labour market, should have been acutely aware.

STATIN’s leadership knows the maxim that ‘time is money’.

Looking from the outside, and based on what was said in Parliament this week, it is a fair conclusion, in the absence of compelling information to the contrary, that this census -taking has not been an efficiently managed project. The question now is: Who is accountable and will be held to account?