KABUL: Afghanistan goes to the polls in less than three weeks’ time, but the new president will have only sketchy information about the people he governs -- something that census official Murtaza Rezai hopes to help rectify.
Rezai goes door-to-door in the capital Kabul, collecting answers to a survey that is the first attempt to calculate the size and makeup of Afghanistan’s population since 1979.
In a country of sharp ethnic divides, the census faces many challenges including a bloody Islamist insurgency, a conservative culture of privacy and fierce complaints from senior Afghan officials who reject its findings.
The task is so sensitive that perhaps the most important question has been left off the survey -- which ethnic group do you belong to?
Despite such obstacles, the five-year project is due to be completed in 2016 as part of international efforts to develop a functioning government in Afghanistan, which has suffered near-constant war since the Soviet invasion of 1979.
One recent morning in the Dasta Barchi district of Kabul, Rezai knocked on the gate of one home until Saleha, a housewife, came nervously to the entrance.
Rezai showed his Central Statistics Office badge and, after a little persuasion, Saleha agreed to answer the survey questions.
Saleha revealed that she is 25, with a husband who sells fruit and that the couple have two daughters aged one and three.
The family pay 2,000 Afghanis ($35) a month in rent for their house, she said, as Rezai carefully noted down her answers.
“Every morning the men go out to work, so we have to interview women instead,” said Rezai, a recent graduate in social sciences who is one of 4,000 census staff conducting the survey in Kabul.
“Women are reluctant to talk to us, but we try to do a 40-minute interview, asking the number of family members, their age, education, whether they have ever fled the country and how many rooms they live in.”
The current election campaign has highlighted how Afghanistan’s various ethnic groups compete for power and money, always claiming they are under-represented or hard done-by.
But the survey ducks the chance to establish exactly how many Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras there are in the country -- a central cause of much tension in Afghan life.
For Mohammad Sami Nabi, head of field operations at the Central Statistics Office, asking the ethnicity question would make the survey impossible -- and perhaps even spark violence.
An attempt at a national head-count in 2008 was abandoned due to the raging war, and billions of dollars have been allocated for health clinics, schools and roads on the basis of incomplete statistics.
AFP
