StatsSA needs a credible captain after Lehohla bows out
Pravin Gordhan and Mcebisi Jonas reiterated their call last week for South Africans to defend the institutions of state, particularly those that fall within the purview of the finance minister.
The Reserve Bank, Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) and Public Investment Corporation (PIC) are top of the list. But to those institutions, the former finance minister and his deputy added Statistics SA.
While statistics is generally thought of as dispassionate and objective facts about the world, it has a highly political role to play. Politicians use statistics, as the Scottish writer Andrew Lang once quipped, as “the way a drunken man uses lamp posts; for support rather than illumination”. President Jacob Zuma has had very little support of this sort. His presidency has seen the constant upward creep of unemployment figures and downward creep in the growth rate of the economy.
Unemployment has climbed from 23.2% to 27.7%. The GDP growth rate regularly outperformed the global average until 2008, but has underperformed every year since — by a full three percentage points in 2016. In per capita terms, South Africans are becoming poorer. The numbers are a searing indictment of Zuma’s presidency.
Statistics, however, are not just politically contested, they are methodologically contested too. There are many ways of measuring unemployment.
Stats SA has two such ways — its quarterly labour force survey and its quarterly employment survey. The first surveys 30,000 households and the second surveys 20,000 VAT-registered businesses. The labour force survey includes informal and agricultural workers, while the employment survey does not. One would think the two methods would at least agree on trends in formal sector employment levels. Oddly, there are periods where they fall out of synch, and there is much inconclusive debate on why this is.
Many other methodological debates can be had over the measures of GDP, inflation and much else. These debates are legitimate when the question is what methodology best illuminates what is really going on in the country.
Reliable statistics are crucial not just for a democratic citizenry to be able to assess the performance of their government, but also for every person and business that needs to plan for the environment they operate in. However, for politicians eager for support, these debates create space to push for methodologies that give the answers they want. Such efforts can undermine public confidence in statistics.
The worst recent case was Argentina, where for a decade the official statistics agency there produced — or deliberately suppressed — inflation and poverty statistics to suit populist president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. When centre-right president Mauricio Macri took power in 2015, he declared a “statistical emergency” and rebuilt the agency’s collections.
The best shot SA has at keeping the task of national illumination as the priority for Statistics SA is to ensure the agency is run by people with integrity, independence of mind and appropriate skills.
The 1999 Statistics Act provides safeguards to ensure the independence of the statistician-general and the agency. It explicitly declares that the finance minister may not interfere in how a statistical collection is undertaken or when — or how it is released to the public.
But that legislated independence does not run very deep. The minister sets out the performance criteria of the statistician-general and oversees compliance. More importantly, the appointment of the statistician-general is made by the president on a renewable five-year term. The legislation is explicit that the person appointed must be appropriately qualified, professionally independent and impartial in performing his or her duties. So, were the president to appoint someone hopelessly inappropriate, like he did when appointing Menzi Simelane as national director of public prosecutions, the courts would overrule him.
However, as has been seen in the case of the National Prosecuting Authority, the president can get his way; at least for a while. The current statistician-general, Pali Lehohla, is stepping down in October after 17 years at the helm of Statistics SA and 34 years with the agency.
He’s seen it all — from the Nationalist government through to modernising the agency and bringing its standards up to international levels. Things have not always gone perfectly under his tenure, such as a 2003 debacle about incorrect inflation measurements and the current large vacancy rate at the agency, but on the whole, he has conducted himself with integrity and professionalism.
If Gordhan and Jonas’s warning is to be heeded, while a keen eye is kept on events at the PIC, FIC — where a new head is also being chosen — and Reserve Bank, it will be important to be vigilant in the process of appointing his successor. It is the price of credible statistics.