Museveni cautions Ugandans against superstitions

President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni has today received the preliminary results of the National Population and Housing Census 2024.

The President received the results at a function held at Kampala Serena Hotel and congratulated the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) for conducting a successful exercise.

“I also congratulate Ugandans for listening to our advice and embracing our programs and you can see things are beginning to work out,” he said.

He also noted that although the census figures are still preliminary, they show the correctness of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) strategy.

“You remember we had problems with some groups that wanted to castrate people, which they are controlling the population but the NRM told you that please, the problem of big families is medical and socio-economical. That is what we told you but people don’t want to listen although we also insist on what we say,” President Museveni asserted.

“When they were saying birth control injections etc., we said this is not the problem, the problem was first of all medical; have a reliable medical service, so that people know that even if you have one child, he will not die unless there’s an accident. So, this business of psychology of having very many children will be addressed. The NRM told you that please, deal with the socio-economic base of the society, the rest will come up more easily. That is how we introduced universal immunisation so that children don’t die. Life expectancy has gone to 63 percent and people are joining the money economy.”

The President further appealed to Ugandans to completely get rid of all old superstitions about counting children and other things, thinking that it will bring bad luck to them. According to President Museveni, things have changed and what people used to think is witchcraft is now scientifically explained.

“You need to change the organic structure of society and start pushing for new ideas not simply saying have less children because even the belief that we don’t want to be counted is part of that problem since our people believed that when you count children, they will die,” he urged.

The Minister of State for Planning, Hon. Amos Lugoloobi thanked President Museveni for successfully championing the National Digital Census.

“We thank you, Your Excellency for approving and funding the digital census and we pray that the government embraces the idea of digitising service delivery across government to get real time results because from this experience we know, we can collect real time data as programs and projects are being conducted across the country,” Hon. Lugoloobi stressed.

“The census results will go a long way in speaking about the performance of National Development Plan III that is ending soon. We will continue to prove to the people of Uganda that indeed it matters to be counted.”

Dr. Albert Byamugisha – UBOS Board of Directors Chairperson said the census exercise was successfully conducted due to the positive contribution by all Ugandans who accepted to be enumerated.

“The product we are receiving today has been enabled by each one of us in one way or the other for instance the government under the able leadership of Your Excellency which prioritised the census exercise and allocated sufficient resources for its successful implementation,” Dr. Byamugisha noted.

“Your Excellency, you further rallied all Ugandans to participate and they listened to your call and we received cooperation from the citizens during the enumeration exercise. In fact, Your Excellency, Ugandans were vigilant and would involve their local council leaders to ensure that they were enumerated,” he added.

The Executive Director of UBOS, Dr. Chris Mukiza informed the President that the bureau had 135,230 field workers, 14,669 enumeration supervisors and 4715 subcounty/ division supervisors with five sets of questionnaires.

Dr. Mukiza also revealed that after the enumeration exercise, they established that Uganda now has a population of 45, 935, 046 people, from 34.6 million counted in 2014.

“This represents an increase by 11.3 million in the last 10 years and it includes 780,061 refugees,” he said.

“We faced various Challenges including hard to reach areas, failure to access some households, refusals by some religious cults and deliberate refusals of households in gates, internal border conflicts like in Apaa, Ombechi, Nyamisingiri among others. There were also unavailable respondents like single person households that leave early and come back late. Also, the geography of some areas was not updated on the system.”

Dr. Mukiza also encouraged the government, private sector and all leaders to use the census data to plan and improve the livelihood of Ugandans.

The 2024 National Population and Housing Census was conducted electronically from May 9-19, 2024, with a mopping-up exercise until May 26, 2024, to ensure complete coverage in the Greater Kampala Metropolitan Area and hard-to-reach districts.