Accurate statistical data is critical for informed decision making. Yet Stats SA is under-resourced and allegedly produces poor data.
It will not come as a shock to those who follow the affairs of Statistics South Africa, the sole producer of official statistics of all kinds in the country, that the quality of its output is being called into question.
Tamar Kahn reports in Business Day that the 2022 Census has been described as a “work of fiction” by University of Cape Town demographer Tom Moultrie.
According to Moultrie, the Census overcounted the South African population by a million people, and contains so many discrepancies, anomalies and inconsistencies with other known data, that it cannot be relied upon.
Stats SA has historically been a well-functioning government service – when most others have not been – but it has complained for years about harsh budget cuts and hiring freezes leading to widening error margins and the loss of skilled staff.
Stats SA dismissed Moultrie’s concerns as unfounded and misleading, but has not addressed the specific example Kahn cited, involving the population of Beaufort West. The Census of 2022 indicates its population grew by 47.2% since 2011, from 49,585 to 72,972 people, although satellite imagery shows only a slight increase in the number of dwellings, which cannot account for the increase in the population size.
Budget cuts
In 2020, the chairperson of the South African Statistics Council, David Everatt, issued a dire warning of the impact of budget cuts starting in 2015.
The Council is a statutory body mandated to advise the Minister of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation and the Statistician-General on any issue concerned with the production and use of official statistics.
“Stats SA right now is at a tipping point,” Everatt wrote. “The warning lights are flashing red, and government needs to act swiftly if South Africa (is) to retain a robust and innovative Stats SA. If Stats SA is not able to fill posts with skilled people, keep sample sizes up, and innovate, the Council will be forced to withdraw support for official statistics. This is the very worst option for everyone in South Africa – but Council either endorses the release of data everyone can trust, or Council stops because we cannot endorse data we mistrust.”
The present Statistician-General, Risenga Maluleke, told the Mail & Guardian in 2020 that the then-Minister in the Presidency, Jackson Mthembu, agreed that there would be serious problems if the funding squeeze continued.
Less than a year ago, the Deputy Minister in the Presidency, Kenny Morolong, told Parliament that budget cuts were having a negative impact on the work of Stats SA, and told the Standing Committee on Public Accounts that budgets were so tight that unauthorised expenditure by Stats SA was actually spent simply to compensate employees.
Architecture of democracy
The former Statistician-General, Pali Lehohla, used stronger words: “The architecture of our democracy rests on these numbers,” adding that budget cuts back in 2003, under his watch, caused costly errors in the estimation of the consumer price index.
An example of statistics that simply aren’t produced anymore involves poverty. The last living conditions survey was conducted in 2015, finding that about half of the population lived below the upper-bound poverty line, but since then, there have been no updates. We simply don’t know – or at least, cannot prove – whether the situation is getting better or worse.
The impacts of unreliable statistics run far and wide.
Academic surveys cannot adjust for demographics if demographic data is inaccurate. Labour force surveys based on incorrect assumptions may over- or under-state employment and unemployment numbers. Investors cannot make informed decisions about markets without accurate data. Government budgets cannot be allocated fairly from national level down to the level of provinces, districts and local municipalities.
Public faith
Perhaps more importantly, faith in the objectivity and reliability of official statistics is crucial to gain public support for government policies. One has only to think back to the pandemic to realise how important quality, trustworthy data really is.
People also use public data to make life decisions, such as choosing where to live, where to send their children to school, or where to invest.
It is also critical that civil society organisations and the media can rely on accurate official data to hold elected politicians and government officials to account. It becomes very hard to judge whether policy interventions are effective, and whether electoral promises are being met, in the absence of data that is widely accepted as reliable.
Despite the denials of Stats SA, the doubt that has now been cast on the reliability of Census data is consistent with the agency’s long history of under-funding and the alarms that have been sounded in the past.
That alone sharply undermines the credibility of not only Census data, but all other official statistics produced by Stats SA.
[Image: AI-generated image of a broken bar chart, intended to symbolise unreliable data or statistics. Image: DALL-E 3.]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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