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 She wondered how Ramsay arrived at his figures and referred him to a Reteng paper presented to the CERD.Reteng says that unrecognised or minority tribes in the country number 1,030, 000 or 60 per cent of the total population, while the main tribes number 305, 000 or 17.9 percent of the total population, with the rest (365,863 or 21 percent) consisting of immigrants. Ramsay's report on ethnic distribution comes hardly two weeks since the Monitor published Reteng's estimates of ethnic distribution. The estimates categorise the population into major and minority tribes. In his report Ramsay claimed that his figures were derived from the 2001 Population and Housing Census although the government statistician Annah Majelantle says there has never been any census on ethnicity since 1965. Ramsay's report was carried in yesterday's edition of Mmegi. He said when asked, 'which Botswana language is your home language' during the 2001 Census, 79 percent of the respondents identified Setswana, 7 percent other Sotho-Tswana languages, 9 percent Ikalanga, 3 percent Seherero or Sembukushu, 2 percent Sesarwa (Khoisan), 1 percent Sesubea (Chikuhane) and 1 percent Seyei. But Nyathi-Ramahobo countered yesterday that the question was not about mother tongues but any language one speaks at home. Hence in Gaborone, most children would speak English and yet this cannot be said to be their mother tongue. Nyathi-Ramahobo said the question in the census was 'what language do you speak at home' and then there were three choices - Setswana, English and other. The other was un-coded while Setswana and English were. Nyathi-Ramahobo argued that the 78 percent cannot be scientifically said to be mother tongue speakers of Setswana but includes those who speak it as a second and even a third language being the lingua franca of the country. "The data also indicated that in areas of Gantsi, only 19 percent of the respondents indicated that they speak Setswana at home, in Northeast it was 37 percent and Northwest it was 41 percent. This indicated that other languages were significantly spoken at home. I also did a quick survey and found out that in some areas, the question was not even asked so as to down play the numbers of the speakers dominant in that area," Nyathi-Ramahobo said. While she admitted that Reteng's figures may not be exact, she said they give a better estimate than data asking people the language spoken at home - without saying how often, what else one speaks and for what purposes and so on. "I think this is a good time to start preparing for data collection during the coming population census as per the recommendation of CERD so that we could be sharing more reliable data," she advised Ramsay.
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