Maputo — Mozambican President Armando Guebuza on Wednesday declared that reliable statistics "illuminate and guide our acts of planning and intervention, based on solid knowledge of our socio-demographic reality".

He was speaking at a Maputo ceremony at which the National Statistics Institute (INE) unveiled the definitive results from the country's third national population census, held in August 2007.

The census data, said Guebuza, were "an important working instrument that allows us to know the socio-demographic reality, and to gauge the effects of our government activities on important social indicators".

The government, he continued, "attributes great importance to investing in the construction of a more wide-ranging base of statistics, that is increasingly reliable and updated, in order to guide our intervention in the development process".

From the information contained in the census, said the President. "we can visualise the successes we have been achieving in this crusade against poverty". He cited in particular the success in pushing the infant mortality rate down from 145.7 to 118.3 deaths per 1,000 live births between 1997 and 2007. Over the same period, the illiteracy rate had fallen from 60.5 to 50.4 per cent of Mozambicans aged 15 and above.

Prior to the publication of the definitive results, "various actors could arm themselves with different data for their dialogue", said Guebuza, "but today common reference points are established for a more fruitful interaction between them. Instead of wasting previous hours and resources trying to reconcile numbers, they now have the opportunity to start from a common basis".

He did not say which "various actors" he had in mind - but the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) head office in New York has repeatedly ignored Mozambican statistics. The UNDP's annual Human Development Reports have always overestimated the size of the Mozambican population, ignoring both the 1997 census, and the preliminary results from the 2007 census.

Overestimating the population leads to underestimating per capita GDP. Since per capita GDP accounts for a third of the UNDP's Human Development Index, the end result of the UNDP's blunder is that its reports make Mozambique out to be even poorer than it really is.

The census numbers, Guebuza said, are not merely for the government's consumption "but are useful for all those involved, directly or indirectly, in planning and monitoring national development. This valuable information is a resource that belongs to all of us: the government, civil society, the private sector, politicians, academics, students, our cooperation partners, all of us".

Nonetheless, census data in itself, no matter how accurate, "will not create jobs, or build schools, roads and bridges". The raw data would not fight poverty "but it presents us with the challenges that we face on the path to the well-being that we are building for our people".

The point, he stressed, was not merely to contemplate "the problematic reality" shown by the census, or to allow the problems "to push us into lamentation and anguish".

"The problems presented are to be solved", Guebuza insisted, "and if each one of us does their part we shall certainly contribute to making qualitative leaps in improving the living standards of our people".