The Loodi Mayor's Maths On Census Data is Utter Bullshit

Lukwago, Lukwago, oh Eliyasiii! My Baganda ancestors chide the young and hungry with the saying, "ebbula ly'enkoko tulikuliisa mp'abaana." Loose translation:  Let not a scarcity of chicken lead you to eating some wild ugly bird. Alas, the scarcity of good opposition politicians has led us to; not only make do with, but love politi-cons like Lukwago.

Of course, Lukwago is relevant.  He never lets the state catch any kind of break. The democracy needs folks like him. He does it in English that fills the mouth. That is; Lukwago abnegates to approbate government any disjunction. It isn't 1944, whence natives went to white man's land, and returned determined to use their white man education to the fullest. But, I do like a guy who finds some use for all that colonial nonsense teachers forced down our throats.  I bet Lukwago would have Shakespeare himself shaking his head saying, "he speaks fancy, doesn't he?"  

Away from his entertainment value though, let's be honest. The Loodi Mayor is the original Donald Trump. He knows you are angry. He knows you can't be bothered to independently express said anger. He offers himself up as a vessel for that anger. While at it, he lies through his teeth, secure in the knowledge that you will not be bothered to look up the truth. You won't even pause your Facebook scrolling to think for a second about what he just said. No. With one eye on the new profile picture your internet stalkee has put up, you'll just like his post and with that simple act validate your anger while also being patriotic; refusing to be lied to by this dictatorship.

With all the above working for him; the Loodi Mayor got nearly 1,000 likes for this post. 

Some mind boggling questions about the recently released National Population and Housing Census Report; 1) The...
Posted by Erias Lukwago on Friday, 25 March 2016

Here is why that post is utter bullshit:
1. "The provisional statistical data released a couple of years ago indicated that our population stood at 34.9 million people yet the final report gives a different figure of 34.6 million people. That discrepancy has not been explained away! !!"
Stop wasting exclamation marks, Ugandans. Provisional results are a first count. They are going to have errors. The first count is useful for accountability and to give planners something to work with in the meantime but a census is a load of work. So, UBOS takes the time to correct it for all the things that could have gone wrong: under counts & over counts, data entry errors, any number of things. A lot of you complained on social media that nobody came to your door to tap your head and hence count you. In the provisional results report, UBOS reported that 7.3 million households with 34.4 million members were counted. So, initially, they corrected for the undercount with an extra half a million Ugandans. Upon closer look, they have corrected that adjustment to just 200,000. Flagging that as a major irregularity is stirring a storm in a tea cup.

2. "The report highlights a drastic increase in the population growth by 10.4 million people from 2002, yet, according to the same report, the country registered an unprecedented decline in the fertility rate during the same period, from 7.1 children per woman to 5.8!!" 
Those poor exclamation marks. Look, even if Uganda's fertility rate fell to 1, the population would grow. It just does, when new people are born.  Especially since, already existing people don't die nearly as much. The population just grows. When it is 5.8 babies a woman, it most certainly is going to grow like crazy.  There are about 9.5 million Ugandan women over the age of 18. Even if we were being very simplistic and said all those 10.4 million were babies that adult Ugandan women gave birth to, that increase would mean that about 800,000 adult women gave birth each year and probably didn't have a second child in the 12 year cycle. Of course it isn't that simple. People emigrate into Uganda. People die. Children under 18 give birth.  At 5.8 lifetime fertility, Ugandan women obviously have many births in a 12 year cycle. Some of those children die also. It isn't as simple as looking at a number and deciding, "I refuse to believe this." 

3. "That during that same period, the average life expectancy miraculously shot up from 50.4 years to 63.3 with no comesurate improvement in the standard of living or provision of quality health facilities."
He also makes some GDP comparisons that are neither here nor there. To stick with his initial thought; let us admit banange; standards of living have improved since 2002. Even by the most mundane indicators: like number of cars on the road, bars in town, people complaining about wi-fi. Life is not what it was in 2002. More seriously though; 50 was an abnormally low life expectancy brought on by modern calamities like the HIV epidemic, war in the north, etc. As we move further away from the brunt of those anomalies, our life expectancy will return closer and closer to normal. So, this isn't a miraculous increase. It is more like a recovery.

4. "That our population stands at 34.6 Million people yet the biometric data captured by the Electoral Commission indicates that we have 15.2 million registered voters in a country that boasts of the youngest population in the world! !!" 
A minority (44%) of our population is adult. We have the youngest population in the world. There isn't any contradiction in that, even if we take his statement at face value.

5. "The report shows that Kampala has got a population of 1.5 million people yet the National Voters Register posts roughly 1.1.million voters, implying that Kampala returns almost 90% voter eligibility!!!!" 
The above is just a lie. The population of Kampala is 1.56 million. If the Loodi Mayor wanted to round off, it would be 1.6. The number of registered voters in Kampala was 1.04 million. Again, if he wanted to round off, it would be 1.0. Going with the official numbers, 67% of people in Kampala are adults. It doesn't seem wholly surprising to me considering it is an urban centre but what do I know?
Until I have better data however, I am not going to dismiss this with just an opinion especially knowing UBOS as one of few Ugandan institutions that actually try to do a decent job.

Look, I am quite partial to the opposition. The poor underdogs against whom all the odds are stuck. But I think we need to ask better of them too,  even as we dream of the day they will help us change the presidential portrait. We can't have them thinking we love them just the way they are. This is not high school romance, and even if it were, we are too old for it. That's why we get to vote. Because we are too old for unconditional love. If opposition politicians want to be cheap popularity seeking liars as big as the one we already have, then, what's the point of even dreaming of change?

Stop encouraging URA to tax private schools

My parents run a private school in Makindye. It’s been 22 years. The school has never turned a profit of more than sh1 million in any given term. What happens more often is that it runs out of cash before the term is out and my dad, poor Baba, digs into his pocket to sail it through. It always manages to pay him back but it also always needs to come back for more sooner or later. When the school needs to make big investments, my dad, poor Baba, takes out loans for it, because small business loan rates in Uganda are so high they would sink the school. The canteen that my parents run at the school turns a far higher margin than the school itself. I suspect the canteen is why they have kept that school open to this day. That, and the fact that it is a community institution now. If they closed it, all my brothers and their peers would probably never speak to them again. Like me, they would not have a primary school to name as their old school. The one I went to was, a few years ago, turned into a more profitable venture — a bar and car washing bay. 

Why does my parents’ and other less known private schools turn so little in profit? Providing education is frustratingly expensive, and for all that talk about how much Ugandans value education, they will only pay so much in school fees. In fact, as the school administrators who manage to charge a decent amount will tell you, once Ugandan parents pay over 400k for a three months term, they become unreasonably demanding. They then want the school to provide a pool table for their kids, the headteacher to participate in the sac race on sports day and free lunch be provided. 

Photo via @mumakeith on twitter 

Of course not every Ugandan parent is cheap like that. Some of you are willingly paying sh1.5m a term to Kampala Parents School, no? So, a school term is about 60 days. You are spending 25k a day to educate your child and it is killing you? So much that you want URA to go in there and get some of it back for you? Try keeping your child at home on that budget —hire someone to teach them something, entertain them, include a meal and tell me about it. Now, because schools collect so many of our children, they manage some economies of scale. But what is saved is often swallowed up again by the next year’s need for a new classroom block, buying off the neighbour who opened a bar right in front of the school gate, repainting the classrooms, and to drain the septic tanks or latrines. Armies of little humans are incredibly hard on infrastructure. If you look at this year’s financial books, you might see some profit, single digit millions. Before the next year opens, the school really needs you to pay school fees on the very first day because any and possibly all the above offline expenses mean they probably couldn’t even provide lunch through the first week if you didn’t pay up.   

When you drop a child off at St Lawrence next year, you will see a new classroom block and think, “ha, kyoka Mukiibi has made money out of us!” The truth maybe that Mukiibi probably would not have been able to admit your child if he hadn’t chosen to plough last year’s surplus into that new classroom block.

Providing education really is frustratingly expensive. I think that’s why it is left to government in most parts of the world. Unfortunately for Uganda, government falls far short of that responsibility. There are well over 30 primary schools in my part of Makindye but only one of them, and the poorest of them is government owned — Kibuye Primary School. If we all had to try and get our kids into Kibuye Primary, a) I would quit my job and home school mine because aint no way she’s getting that kind of education b) there would be riots as parents queue for miles outside the school gate. But we have private schools and it is quite easy to be petty and deploy URA to go get some of our money back without remembering the service gap they fill. 

If you are unhappy about the amount of money you are paying at the private school you took your child to, find another one. Take them to my mama’s school. We pay sh280k a term and our kids count and read just as fine as yours (Trust me, my nine year old is reading Charles Dickens). You don’t need a government tax regime to settle your vendetta with Sudhir. What that would do instead is allow government to profit from the fact that it isn’t providing adequate education in the first place. And, to the regular parent in Bwaise, URA skimming off schools' surplus income will mean that, their neighborhood school will a) hike fees to make it up, b) not accept fees in installments anymore because it can’t afford to. 

Dear journalists, instead of fanning the fire between URA and schools with antagonistic quotes and anecdotes, why don’t you actually look at the financial books of a good sample of private schools and tell us how much they are actually making vis-à-vis the proprietors' investment. How does that compare to say a bar and washing bay business? Maybe we can make more school proprietors see the light and go into bars for themselves, like my old teachers did. 

Related fact: I am attending a private university in the US that collects $63,000 a year from each student (in my program anyway) and raises three times its tuition revenue from donors & its endowment. It is tax exempt. In fact, it is registered as a non-profit. Maybe that is what we need to do for our private schools. Donate generously to them and lobby for them to be made non-profits so that we feel better about our money. Many private schools would jump at being publicly subsidized even if that meant they were going to be legally non-profit. They are practically non-profit. Many are. 

The people whose votes didn't count: Rukungiri, Jinja, Kyenjojo, Kabale...

The Uganda Electoral Commission announced incumbent Yoweri Museveni, winner of the 2016 presidential elections even though, by its own tallying, results from 1,787 polling stations have not been transmitted. That number is even more striking when you see where those uncounted polling stations are located. Nearly 90% of the polling stations left out are in just 9 districts. At the top is Rukungiri, Kiiza Besigye's home district, where votes from only 3 (1%) of the 276 polling stations were counted.



Why would they not count votes from 281 Kampala and Wakiso polling stations? If it came to it, you literally can send a bodaboda from the Electoral Commission to any part of Wakiso or Kampala to go fetch the returning officer and his paper tally. You people, Buganda has in the past, threatened to secede over much smaller slights! 

But all things considered, we, the Baganda, will now take several seats. We give the right to threaten secession over to the Bakiga, Basoga and some quarters of Tooro. From Rukungiri, Jinja, Kyenjojo and Kabale, nearly twice as many polling stations were excluded as from the rest of the country combined. 

Edit: In response to a colleague's request to quantify the number of votes not counted, I estimate it's about 741,000 votes. Using the Electoral Commission's data I calculated average number of voters per polling station in each district and voter turn-up by region. I then multiplied by the number of polling stations whose votes were not counted to get an estimate of votes not counted. The nine districts with big undercounts were excluded when calculating voter turn-up in their regions since they would artificially skew the data. Here is the spreadsheet.


This graphic shows how many of the uncounted polling stations came from where.

PS: It is Uganda Bureau of Statistics, not I, which subdivides Uganda along the tribal/colonial regions indicated above. Not I. Me, I am neither tribal nor colonial. 

423 Incidents of Political Violence Involving the UPDF on Foreign Land

One candidate who delayed his entrance to the stage for over a minute, may have jinxed the Uganda presidential debate thing for those of us watching from outside countries. My NTV live stream died right about then and remains off.

But, speaking of Uganda's foreign policy, here is a map showing some 423 foreign battles that the UPDF has engaged in over the last 18 years. Data Credit: ACLED. It is a University of Sussex project that curates (from the media and other sources) reports of battles and other forms of political violence.

If you click a bulb, you will see some notes on what the incident was. I have colour coded battles with other armed forces as yellow. Yellow also includes instances of remote violence; like air strikes and large explosive attacks. Green is for incidents that are related to conflict but not violent themselves -- like setting up a base. Red is for violence against civilians and rioters/protestors. 

For Somalia, I have included only those incidents that were specifically attributed to the UPDF, not all AMISON action. Evidently, I have excluded domestic incidents. You can see the domestic picture in an earlier blog here.  

The discrepancies in voter counts says more about our data culture than vote theft

First of all, a round of applause to Javie Ssozi and Evelyn Namara, for surfacing the fact that the tallies in the Electoral Commission voter counting are off by 20,000. Yeah, 20,000! You can now start telling trolls, “you missed the point by 20,000.” 

However are the 20,000 ‘ghost voters’? I kind of wish they were. I don’t like vote theft but at least that would be an active and intentional scheme. More likely though, it is more evidence that the people we pay with our taxes just can’t be bothered to show up at office with their heads screwed on. The electoral commission is headed by a mathematician. Badru Kiggundu was the dean of the faculty of technology at Makerere University for a long time. When he wants to stuff the voter register, he will know to run the data through excel and make the tallies match. In this case though, he and his staff just don’t give a hoot what the voter register looks like. They collected wrong tallies from the different polling stations and just threw them onto the page. They didn’t expect anyone to take a second look at. It isn’t the Ugandan thing to do. (Thanks again Evelyn and Javie, for being the exception). 

Why do I think this is clumsiness rather than malicious register stuffing? I work with government generated data all the time for my data journalism classes and writing work. Also, when I worked with Marie Stopes, a reproductive health NGO, I spent a year in close and painful proximity with the national health information system. It really is sad how much the government just doesn’t care about data quality.  

When we look at police crime reports for our trainings at ACME, the first thing we do is create our own totals. The working journalist will tell you there is no story in the discrepancy between our totals and the published crime statistics. The published police numbers are always off. By the thousands. And how could they ever possibly be accurate? Everything; from how crime data is collected, transmitted, tallied and reported takes the attitude that numbers don’t matter. Essentially, this is how the police generates crime statistics. In the best case scenario. 

• Incidents are written in that large book at the front desk
• By hand, someone counts the different kinds of incidents and writes them up on a board at the end of day
• At the end of the week, someone (by hand) tallies the different categories and walks to a bigger police post to submit their tally. 
• That bigger post tallies the totals submitted by the smaller ones, adds its own manual tally and sends that further up the chain. On it goes, until the records reach police headquarters in Kampala. From one command level to another new tallies are generated, new errors introduced, typos transmitted, etc. 

The only point at which automation or computerization enters the process is when someone is typing the annual crime report. In this day, when for a few million shillings, you could build an SMS based reporting system enabling each police station to submit their day’s record directly to an automated dashboard at police headquarters, police officers are hand delivering handwritten, inaccurately tallied paper records, as if we are some pre-technology civilization somewhere in the Kalahari desert. 

The recording of national health statistics isn’t quite as rudimentary but not much better. The village level clinics (which government preposterously calls health centre 2) fill out a paper form at the end of the month, take the physical copy to the health centre 3 above them, which tallies that area's statistics and submits that tally to the health centre 4, which tallies a larger area and sends it to the district. In some districts, there is a computer loaded with the district health information system which feeds into the national health information system so automation happens at that level. In others, those hand filled forms will later on, be submitted to the ministry of health here in Kampala. If some are lost along the way, rained on as the district health officer makes their way off a bus in Arua park on a rainy morning, well, then, that's tough luck for whoever cares about national statistics. 

Of course, by the time you generate a final statistic out of this kind of data process, the numbers are schizophrenic. Everybody who could have, has had their opportunity to introduce their own variety of error. The guy who can’t count submitted his wrong tally. The district officer who didn’t want her region to look too bad (in crime or ill-health) has done her doctoring. The overworked clerks have missed digits here and there. You wouldn’t even know where the errors came from. You wouldn’t know how to fix any of it. In any case who wants to fix any of it? 

I suspect, the electoral commission’s data collection and transmission is not much more evolved than the police or health information system. Voter numbers and tallies were sent up the electoral administration bureaucracy as if the commission headquarters didn’t have an electronic version of the register itself. Nobody could be bothered to quality check the information, because really, nobody in this country (except the good folks at UBOS) believes that accuracy means anything. When you don't think data quality is even a thing, you have the electoral commission publishing tallies that are sometimes even less than the right total. That's no way to stuff the register but it certainly is a way to show yourself as stunningly clumsy and careless.

I personally get actively suspicious only when I see wrong numbers coming out of UBOS. Those guys don’t make mistakes. If they publish the wrong statistic, they are deliberately doctoring. Everybody else, just deflates me. In my experience, they are just plain clumsy or they don’t give a hoot about what information they are putting out there. That, on some level is an even sadder reality. The fact that Ugandans default to mediocrity in every job we are given, makes me hopeless. 

Is This What Peace Looks Like?

Last week, I explained to my professor, Steve Coll, that I signed up for his 'Armies and Spies' reporting class because the army is a huge part of public life in Uganda. At that point, I was thinking of oddities like: the UPDF runs agricultural extension, the Miss Uganda beauty contest and as of last week, spraying urban pests and rodents! Plus, that, for 15 years now, the police has been headed by active army generals. 

Saying out loud that "the army is a huge part of public life",  got me wondering what our actual lives then look like, seen through the barrel of a gun.  So I went to ACLED, a service which curates incidents of political violence in Africa and Asia to check that out. Using their data for 1997 to 2015 , I created the heatmap below. Behind it are reports on 4612 events of political violence: battles between warring parties and unreturned violence on civilians.  That is; one armed conflict incident for every 36 hours of the period. I suppose the bloodbath picture in northern Uganda isn't suprising, because there was a war there, but look at the rest of the country!

Right after I pulled that data, I saw a TV clip in which Museveni was boasting to a crowd that because of NRM, Uganda is peaceful for the first time in 500 years. Really?! How did we survive extinction in the 500 years prior to NRM?  4612 incidences of political violence in the most recent 18 years of the NRM epoch and that is what peace looks like? What did the opposite of peace look like? 

Then again, maybe the army has just been proactively defending us from the bad guys. Of course it has been. 40% of the time. In many (but a minority of those reported incidents), the defenders of our freedoms were totally doing battle (or getting set to) for us.  

Reported Incidents of Armed Violence Events in Uganda (1997 - 2015)
Type of Incident	Number	Percentage
Battle-Government regains territory	41	1%
Battle-No change of territory	1683	36%
Battle-Non-state actor overtakes territory	12	0.3%
Headquarters or base established	41	1%
Remote violence	66	1%
Riots/Protests	673	15%
Violence against civilians	1705	37%
Total	4611

However, while the defenders of our freedoms were away somewhere, more than 80 different groups of armed bandits and the Uganda Police (for I dare not call them bandits ) were having their day shooting at civilians. Of course,  the LRA ranks highest, followed by the ADF and Karimojong militia. The Uganda Police holds fourth place. Hey, even the UPDF got in on the action against civillians -- in 22 of the reported incidents, taking fifth place. After those five, the arena of armed men against civilians splits into a riot of actors. See all them below. Bokora Ethnic militia? Banyole Ethnic militia? Ikuruk? Really? Is my household the only grouping of Ugandans left out of the action?

Mr Museveni, considering the national picture, I suggest we now start to measure peace in per capita units. That will keep us on message.