Numbers ending in a lot of zeroes.

In Southern Sudan there were six million people in the census in the early eighties (including me). Most people believe that by the mid-nineties only 2 million remained in the south, 2 million had fled and 2 million died who shouldn’t have. This number ‘feels’ right, sounds convenient and is very easy to keep alive in documentation. I have used it myself.

Yet, I have always said: Never believe any figure ending in three zeroes, especially if it comes from a UN body or an NGO. It is usually plucked out of the sky.

So what about these figures ending in six zeroes? Well, certainly, it is impossible to verify them. I have a close knowledge of certain parts of the Southern Sudanese population, originating in Equatoria. I taught the parents and now know the children and I have to agree that one third of them have certainly been in exile (probably more), another third are in a strange limbo, sometimes in, sometimes out (it is a border area) but I could not justify a claim that one third of them died. That would mean that of the six hundred students we had in our first year in Juba Day Secondary school, 200 had died. Even allowing for the normal death rate, and for specific cases I know about, such as one executed for some infraction when he became an SPLA officer, and the baby of one of my ex-clerks who died from his father’s drunken neglect, and a group of wild life officers executed by the Arabs in 1992 for suspected sympathy with the SPLA incursion into Juba (which left lasting resentment, as the SPLA didn’t follow through, so many people who had revealed their sympathies were punished by the Arabs when the SPLA withdrew). I cannot say that I know that one third died.

In Congo, through knowledge of people I work with, the ‘extra deaths’ theory would seem to be more plausible. The mother of one of my trainers was the only one of nine Hema women captured by the Lendus one day who was not hacked to death. There are huge areas where there has been no modern medical care for years, even preceding the war. Still, three million ….

Often when we find that an NGO is reporting devastation in ‘its’ area, if we examine a little deeper we find that a good part of the population didn’t die, they just fled. Goma went from 50,000 people to 500,000 people in ten years. Much of the increase was of people flowing in from conflict-ridden rural areas. Schools closing in rural areas were matched by heavily overcrowded schools in the town And this urbanisation will 'stick'; not everyone will go back, ever, whatever we in agencies think should happen.