The Bureau of Statistics explains

Jul 04, 2016 Letters

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Dear Editor;
We wish to respond to a letter published in your newspaper on Friday, July 1, 2016 by Mr. Haresh Singh where he called for the detailed census data.  In this article Mr. Singh suggested that the chairmanship of the Board of Statistics should be returned to the Minister of Finance.  However, Mr. Singh should note that the reason for the Minister of Finance divorcing himself from the chairmanship of this Board was to allow for greater transparency of the statistics produced by the entity as the Stats Bureau, in the past, has been accused of manipulating data to suit the political party of the time.
Mr. Singh also suggested that the Board of the Stats Bureau should be headed by someone with more experience such as the Governor of the Bank of Guyana.  However, if Mr. Singh had done his homework properly, he would know that the Governor of the Bank of Guyana is a present member of the Board of the Bureau of Statistics.  Mr. Singh then reverts his position by saying that the entity should be chaired by a Parliamentary Committee, this clearly indicates that Mr. Singh has no idea as to how the Bureau of Statistics should be governed and is just using the media to air his ignorance of this very specialized field of work.
Mr. Singh noted that the present chairman, Dr. Natasha Gaskin-Peters, was academically accomplished but stated that she was young.  This is very surprising given that many of these same individuals have accused the present coalition government of hiring geriatrics who were mostly men, but when a young highly qualified woman is hired, they also have an issue with that.  It seems to me that you just cannot please some people.  Mr. Singh’s prejudice ideology of believing that our young people have no role to play in shaping the policies of this country, has no place in the twenty first century.
With regards to the Census, once again if Mr. Singh had done his homework, he would know that now in addition to the Preliminary Report the first Compendium on the final Census results was disseminated on the Bureau’s website in early June, 2016 as the Minister of Finance did indicate that the month of June would see the commencement of dissemination of the Final Report. The Bureau had self-imposed a target of 30th June (yesterday) for the dissemination of the second Compendium, which now addresses such issues as the most important age-structure of our population, the changing ethnic composition of our population, the median age of our population (is our population still young?) among others.
Though yesterday’s target was missed due to some logistical issues, the Bureau can confidently say that the second Compendium will be disseminated on its website in the coming week.  More importantly the Chief Statistician did indicate that the dissemination of the second Compendium would be accompanied by a media briefing on the analysis of results so far generated, and it is the Bureau’s intention to hold such an event towards the end of next week.
There is now a plethora of information available from preliminary report through to Compendium 1 (did Mr. Singh really check the website?) to be now further augmented in a matter of days by the information in Compendium 2.  The intended dissemination of the Final census results has been organized this time around four(4) main Compendiums that address as priority the highest-demanded issues on the population. Information on the dissemination schedule of Compendium 3 which addresses inter alia the whole aspect of Economic activity and the Labour Force in Guyana will be shared shortly.
We also wish to enlightened, Mr. Singh, to the fact that where the conduct and funding of national surveys are concerned the Bureau must receive express approval from Cabinet before it can take the field to conduct any survey, in addition to the provision of funds, and this has been so from time immemorial.  Just to conduct the field work for any nationwide survey easily costs about G$ 150 Mn.  Even with these constraints, the lack of labour force data beyond 2006is due to the previous administration not giving approval for the execution of the last survey which was schedule for 2008.
In recognition of this fact, plans for the next labour force survey are already in train with assistance from a major multilateral organization for a target start of January, 2017.  The new model will utilize smaller samples reducing the cost and allow continuous annual executions of the Survey with key indicators being generated on a twice-yearly basis.
While is it easy for Mr. Singh to say “fire all of the senior management team at the Bureau”, this is utterly ridiculous as finding staff with statistical skills is extremely challenging given that the University of Guyana, on average produces less than ten  graduates per year in the area of statistics.  The Board has recognised these facts and several measures are being put in place in order to expand staffing at the Bureau while strengthening the present skills-set of thecurrent staff of Bureau.
The Bureau is a very unique and important entity within our nation and we have to be extremely careful not to jeopardize its survival by making very ad-hoc decisions.  For Mr. Singh’s information, the problems and issues facing all statistical offices in the region are decidedly similar to the extent that the Caricom Heads of Government have found it important enough to address the matter collectively. The transformation of the Bureau has and will continue as we aim to make this entity one of the premier statistical agencies within the Caribbean.
Dr. Natasha Gaskin-Peters
Mr. Lennox Benjamin

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