LAST WORD
A Year That Was
O
chieng remembers being told by a
motherly looking nun at a Sunday
school, which was then compulsory
if you were enrolled in a missionary school,
that Jesus was born during a census when
all the Jews had to go back to where they
were born to be counted.
She intoned that during the time that
Quirinius was governor of Syria, the Roman
Emperor Augustus decreed that the entire
world should be registered, of course to the
Romans wherever they were was the known
world as per them.
If it sounds a bit pompous don’t forget that
the Americans do actually have a baseball
world series that only involves America but
the irony does not register since Americans
do actually think that the world is America.
The census then was for the purposes of the
Roman Empire to ascertain the number of
people under its rule and to organize tax
collection districts. The Romans deemed
it a privilege to subjugated peoples to pay
taxes for the Pax Romana.
The 200 year period between 27 BC and
180 AD saw unprecedented peace and
economic prosperity in the Roman world
that stretched from England in the north to
Morocco in the south all the way to Iraq
in the East.
In Kenya the first census happened in 1948
but the results were not published until
1952 due to on the ground challenges, the
main one being that amongst many tribes
of Kenya it is considered a bad omen to
count one’s children or even people in a
household.
So Ochieng was not surprised when
the just concluded census was trashed
by leaders, some even threatening to go
to court to have the ‘fictitious’ numbers
annulled and many commented that there
was a hidden agenda to the numbers that
apparently decimated their tribes.
The hue and cry is based on the fact that
the census is the vehicle which is used
to allocate national resources and those
making the most noise were simply seeing
their slush funds dwindling as the reality
on the ground did not match their grossly
inflated egos.
Interestingly the census was reported by
county and it is amazing how the leaders
were able to extrapolate the figures and
come up with tribal figures. Have we
become so tribal that everything is seen in
We teach our children to cheat and that
money can buy everything that they
need and wonder how come our institu-
tions and industries are failing. Kenya
has become a deal making country and
everybody is a tender deal away from his
or her breakthrough.
94 MAL33/19 ISSUE
the light of one’s tribe?
Most of the complainants claimed that
the figures were not factual; Ochieng just
wonders where their facts were derived
from and why they have not shared the
information on their parallel servers to
discredit the published figures.
If we had reliable registration of births
and deaths and people got their IDs at
birth rather than when they are eighteen
then census figures would not be as
contentious as the country would have a
pretty good running total of inhabitants
at any given moment.
Ochieng is much more interested in
an exercise that Kenyans were taken
through to acquire the Huduma Namba
with an implied threat that individuals
that failed to get the new ‘unique’
identification number would be denied
government services.
Ochieng has always thought that his
ID number is unique and that no other
Kenyan has that same number but it
appears that may not be true since it
is claimed the Huduma Namba will be
unique as opposed to the shared current
ID number.
If this is true then those doubting the
census figures should be actually worried
that the reported figures are inflated
and not understated, if there is double
issuance of IDs and the reported results
by IEBC for any election could be
inflated by the double registration. There
may be ghost Kenyans.
Ochieng has also thought that his
passport, mobile phone number, driving
license, NSSF, NHIF and his bank
accounts are all unique numbers personal
to him but the Huduma exercise has put