Bolivia is just over four months away from carrying out the Population and Housing Census and yet there are too many mishaps, delays, shortages and disorganization that no one gives guarantees or certainties that a good X-ray will be taken on November 16 of the country, as is the purpose.
In these conditions, perhaps the most advisable thing is to postpone the consultation, fire all the inefficient officials who are not doing their job well and appoint trained professionals to carry out the Census with a new date for which work should begin immediately.
This time it is not voices from the opposition or from the regions that bring the criticism, but from the national government itself that recognizes that there are delays in the pre-census work.
The Deputy Minister of Autonomies, Álvaro Ruiz, admitted that the National Institute of Statistics (INE) still does not have the mobile devices to carry out the mapping. But more worrying than that is that map updaters have not yet moved to rural areas and remote regions. Not even in the cities are the cartographies completed. Advanced they are, but not finished.
With reference to the lack of equipment, the Minister of Planning, Sergio Cusicanqui, assures that in addition to the restriction of production and commercialization of technological equipment due to the pandemic, there has been a transport and trade crisis in the world that affects the countries because prices have gone up. Added to that is Russia’s war with Ukraine. In other words, even the global pandemic due to Covid-19, the global logistics crisis and now the Russian invasion have lined up to boycott the Bolivian Census.
Another of the factors pointed out by the minister is that there is a high level of politicization of the Census, conflict of limits and the new wave of the coronavirus, which could affect the normal progress of the census process. The minister did not say who he was referring to by ‘politicization’, but it is very unlikely that it is a self-criticism.
Much has been said to criticize the various insurmountable shortcomings in the management of the Census, but perhaps the sentence that best describes the problem is the one said by the Governor of Tarija Óscar Montes, when he assures that ‘there is no possibility that (the Census) will come out well’, because it has been developed as a political act and not as a technical-administrative process, which is what was appropriate.
Thus, the Census has a very bad face. To the initial mistrust due to the political management and the lack of transparency that the Government showed, there are now added the irregularities that, before applying any ballot, already give a first result: the Census, carried out as it is being done, will be a complete and very costly failure for the country.
In Chuquisaca, the authorities of the department and the capital have formally requested that the Census be postponed and in the coming days they will meet with their counterparts from Tarija and Potosí to add those departments to the postponement request.
A few days ago, Minister Cusicanqui announced that the results of the November 16 Census would be known a year later, and that calculation is also striking. In previous censuses, despite the fact that the technologies were not as advanced as today, the results were known seven months after the consultation, but not 12 months. In short, if we already know that we are heading for failure, isn’t it better to stop and change course?
Bolivia is just over four months away from carrying out the Population and Housing Census and yet there are too many mishaps, delays, shortages and disorganization that no one gives guarantees or certainties that a good X-ray will be taken on November 16 of the country, as is the purpose.
In these conditions, perhaps the most advisable thing is to postpone the consultation, fire all the inefficient officials who are not doing their job well and appoint trained professionals to carry out the Census with a new date for which work should begin immediately.
This time it is not voices from the opposition or from the regions that bring the criticism, but from the national government itself that recognizes that there are delays in the pre-census work.
The Deputy Minister of Autonomies, Álvaro Ruiz, admitted that the National Institute of Statistics (INE) still does not have the mobile devices to carry out the mapping. But more worrying than that is that map updaters have not yet moved to rural areas and remote regions. Not even in the cities are the cartographies completed. Advanced they are, but not finished.
With reference to the lack of equipment, the Minister of Planning, Sergio Cusicanqui, assures that in addition to the restriction of production and commercialization of technological equipment due to the pandemic, there has been a transport and trade crisis in the world that affects the countries because prices have gone up. Added to that is Russia’s war with Ukraine. In other words, even the global pandemic due to Covid-19, the global logistics crisis and now the Russian invasion have lined up to boycott the Bolivian Census.
Another of the factors pointed out by the minister is that there is a high level of politicization of the Census, conflict of limits and the new wave of the coronavirus, which could affect the normal progress of the census process. The minister did not say who he was referring to by ‘politicization’, but it is very unlikely that it is a self-criticism.
Much has been said to criticize the various insurmountable shortcomings in the management of the Census, but perhaps the sentence that best describes the problem is the one said by the Governor of Tarija Óscar Montes, when he assures that ‘there is no possibility that (the Census) will come out well’, because it has been developed as a political act and not as a technical-administrative process, which is what was appropriate.
Thus, the Census has a very bad face. To the initial mistrust due to the political management and the lack of transparency that the Government showed, there are now added the irregularities that, before applying any ballot, already give a first result: the Census, carried out as it is being done, will be a complete and very costly failure for the country.
In Chuquisaca, the authorities of the department and the capital have formally requested that the Census be postponed and in the coming days they will meet with their counterparts from Tarija and Potosí to add those departments to the postponement request.
A few days ago, Minister Cusicanqui announced that the results of the November 16 Census would be known a year later, and that calculation is also striking. In previous censuses, despite the fact that the technologies were not as advanced as today, the results were known seven months after the consultation, but not 12 months. In short, if we already know that we are heading for failure, isn’t it better to stop and change course?
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