President Museveni has said that although the census figures are still preliminary, they show the correctness of the NRM strategy.
He made the remarks while officially receiving the preliminary results of the 2024 Census at Kampala Serena Hotel.
“You remember we had problems with some groups that wanted to castrate people, that 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,” 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 yeara and people are joining the money economy.”
Museveni congratulated the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) for conducting a successful exercise and 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.
“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.
Dr. Albert Byamugisha – UBOS 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.
According to preliminary figures, Uganda’s population now stands at 45.9 million an increase of 11.3 million people since the last census was conducted in 2014.
Dr. Chris Mukiz, the executive director of UBOS said they had 135,230 field workers, 14,669 enumeration supervisors and 4715 subcounty/ division supervisors with five sets of questionnaires.
