Rabat – The National Federation of Amazigh Associations directed a message of protest to the High Planning Commission for not reporting the number of Amazigh-speaking Moroccans in its census results, according to a new report by Qushq.
The group cited a number of “reservations” regarding the results of the December 2014 census, which does not include information on the number of Amazighi speakers in the kingdom, despite the inclusion of checkboxes regarding the matter on the census forms.
In a statement to Qushq, the organization questioned the benefit of collecting information on the prevalence of the Amazigh language if the Moroccan people will not get to see the real results.
The HCP’s final results included a previous figure for the portion of Moroccans who speak Amazighi based on a sample size of two percent of the population, which was followed with a “non-exclusive” indicator in parenthesis.
“What does the commission want the Moroccan people to understand from this mystery?” the association said, adding that the words in the parenthesis had “no meaning” and that surveying two percent of the population could not lead to the same information gleaned from a national census.
The group added that the HCP has allocated MAD 864.7 million for Amazighi education projects based on the statistic from the two-percent sample, but no government leader or civil service group has asked for clarification on the figure until now.
Amazigh became an official language of Morocco, alongside French and Arabic, after the adoption of the post-Arab Spring 2011 constitution, which guaranteed the original inhabitants of the region full cultural and political rights in the kingdom.
