The Census Issue Is Very Sensitive In Somaliland

By Ibrahim Adam Ghalib, Borama, Awdal

Demography is the study of statistics birth-deaths and disease etc in order to show the state of a community. In other words studying the population of a country or community is a frame work in which to plan and assess for all political socio-economic development activities of any community or country. Census (tirakoob) is the bases for any power sharing such as parliament and cabinet etc.

In this respect an electoral voter’s registration is also required in order to regulate a fair share for our community and to get an accurate data. The electoral college of America is based on the population of the regions or cities and this was assessed from the beginning.

Since I reached maturity age the population of Somaliland was not known or the people were in disagreement about it. All efforts failed to do census in the country. There was and is still no identity cards or birth certificates for the new born When I was entering the school, I was measured against the wall to determine my age. During the British rule and the post independence of Somalia this was a sensitive issue. It was roughly based on the persons registered for each Nabadoon in which he pays the blood money (Mag) The criteria in which the east of Somaliland pays mag is different from the west side. In the east the male babies are counted while in the west only the person who has a family is counted. The female population was always uncertain.

  There is always a bitter disagreement in this matter between the east and west of Somaliland. We believe in the west that population of Somaliland is more in the west than the east (this is from Hargeisa west wards) and the east believe the opposite. In this respect the censuses so far arranged was disrupted because they do not want the reality and truth about this matter to be discovered.

In 1960 the seats of the parliament was shared not on population but on conciliatory basis. The successive administrations of Somaliland could not solve this matter and now it is the most difficult issue facing this administration. When I was contesting the parliamentary election my teeth was checked for my age. There are no identity cards now to determine the citizenship of a person. Nobody even have birth certificate for his children. There is no electoral registration and any body who speaks Somali language is eligible to vote.

In the last JNA meeting the problem of population was one of the hottest agenda when the United Nations estimated the population of Somaliland as 1,700,000 and Somaliland was fiercely arguing the population to be 3,500,000. Now this problem reached to disrupt even our decisions at higher level for things that are important to the country.

In this information age this is easy to be solved unless we have something to hide.

Discipline is the training of the mind and character aimed at producing self control. It is the right time to solve this problem once and for all. We need a specialized consortium to do the census on a computerized network so that people will not cheat and double registration be avoided then and only then our census will be in order and the power sharing will be based correctly on the population of each region.

Source: Somaliland Times