Murky numbers game
Minister in the Presidency Nkosazana DlaminiZuma was reported to have said when tabling her budget vote for Statistics SA that “credible statistics are necessary to ensure a better life for all South Africans” because “policy makers and implementers use the data produced to inform decisions, [and] without good statistics the policy development, planning and decision-making process is a blind one. We cannot learn from our mistakes and the public cannot hold us accountable. Statistics allow us to understand and learn from the past.”
I agree, but in the absence of definitions we still won’t know what we are talking about. For example, the government constantly raises the challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment. Statistics SA tells us that 55% of the population is defined as living in poverty, that we have the worst Gini coefficient in the world, and that 26% of our working population is “officially” unemployed.
The Economist defines poverty “as a short, brutish and wretched life with no reliable access to education, healthcare, proper clothing and shelter, let alone electricity and potable water and enough food for physical and mental health”. It mentions that the internationally acceptable extreme poverty line is $1.25 (R15) a day, but that in the richer parts of the emerging world $4 (R50) a day is the poverty barrier.
In contrast, Statistics SA tells us that 88% of the population live in a formal dwelling with a mobile phone, colour television, access to subsidised electricity and potable water and free education. Some 17-million citizens are the beneficiaries of our expanded social grant system. It is therefore doubtful that 55% of our citizens live in the poverty conditions defined by the Economist above — closer to 5.5%, maybe.
Likewise with inequality, do we define our Gini coefficient in a manner that includes social grants, pensions, disability allowances, foster parenting allowances, free schooling, subsidised housing, electricity, water and the like – or excludes them, just measuring earned income and crudely comparing the top 10% with the bottom 10%?
And in respect of “official” unemployment, do we define the 6.5-million people “unofficially” economically engaged in the informal sector (valued at R850bn per annum) as being lumped with the 8-million “officially” unemployed in the formal sector?
This raises a much larger question: is the government agenda informing what Statistics SA publishes, or is what Statistics SA publishes informing the government’s agenda? Given the inconsistencies cited above, methinks it is the former. I’m not sure Dlamini-Zuma wants our statistics to “learn from the past”, rather to use them to “justify the future”.
Steuart Pennington
Nottingham Road