StatsSA council’s threat to quit en masse
Ultimatum to government: R200m cash injection to save crucial agency, as expert warns it could destroy SA
STATISTICS SA’s council yesterday gave the government an ultimatum to provide a R200 million cash injection to the understaffed national statistics agency or face its resignation en masse, warning that budgetary constraints are endangering credible statistics.
South Africa’s economy is under the harsh spotlight of investors and ratings agencies, and investors need credible statistics to invest.
The advisory body, which is responsible for crunching the numbers at StatsSA, said it was on the brink of collapse due to the failure of filling critical posts.
Professor David Everatt, chairperson of the SA Statistics Council, said in their annual report: “The need for more analysis and reporting, and additional data-gathering exercises are continually made clear to StatsSA – but it is simply unable to respond while the budget remains static, while staff are over-burdened and see little prospect for promotion in a frozen-post environment.
He warned the agency was losing critical technical, analytic and other skills – just as Census 2021 was becoming a reality.
Everatt said StatsSA’s cash crunch had led to 685 posts out of an essential 3 511 remaining vacant since 2016 when the government went on an austerity programme, which included 170 key management posts and 26 posts on an acting capacity.
“If you want to destroy a country, you disable the information systems, and that is becoming not new in South Africa. The statistics office is the last bastion to destroy. Look at what happened in Argentina and Greece,” former statistician-general Dr Pali Lehohla said yesterday.
Lehohla said he had come within a whisker of suing the state over the budgetary constraints in 2016, but was assured it would be settled out of court, which still had not happened.
Lehohla said the blame lay “with the guys at National Treasury” on the implementation of austerity measures in 2016 who took much more than 1 percent of the agency’s budget as required and never gave it back, which had crippled the agency. This has led to StatsSA having to hold off on some programmes, including the survey on poverty and the Income and Expenditure Survey, which were not released last year.
Efficient Group chief economist Dawie Roodt said: “If you don’t have an efficient production central-data agency… Investors believe in the statistics you provide as a country, and they might look elsewhere. That department is far more important than the Department of Sport and Recreation and other departments, because of the crucial information it provides.”
Roodt said the ratings agencies such as Moody’s, which revised South Africa’s growth prospects down to 0.7 percent from 1.5 percent and is expected to issue a credit ratings downgrade, and investors counted heavily on the efficiency, trustworthiness and confidence with which a country’s data was produced.