The most important aspect of the debate about South Africa’s unemployment rate is being lost in the noise: keep the politicians as far away as possible from the statistics services.
If there is indeed something wrong with the unemployment numbers, as Capitec CEO Gerrie Fourie has suggested with his claim that unemployment is closer to 10% than the official rate of 32.9%, then let’s get some big brains in a room and help Stats SA fix the problem. But please, please, keep the politicians out of the whole thing. If politicians start fiddling with the numbers, or having control over them, or the institutions that work on producing statistical data, then the country is doomed.
Remember the age-old saying: there are lies, damned lies — and statistics. If we allow politicians control over the numbers then we will be on the terrible road of “voodoo statistics”, bad policymaking, propaganda and bad governance.
An independent, credible statistical service guarantees the country’s ability to make policy based on cold, hard facts. If the statistical service and its products — the census, the employment numbers, measuring GDP and so forth — come under the control of the executive, then we might as well hand over the offices of the public protector and the auditor-general, along with the South African Human Rights Commission, to the Presidency.
We will enter an Orwellian world: if there are too many poor people for comfort, then the politician in charge can simply change the numbers. We would become Zimbabwe, which has an unemployment rate of 11.92%.
We will enter an Orwellian world: if there are too many poor people for comfort, then the politician in charge can simply change the numbers
Statistics are a country’s gold dust, and they must be protected from political manipulation.
We are not the first country to face scrutiny of our statistics. In April 2023 China’s youth unemployment rate hit a record high of 20.4%. It rose to 20.8% the following month and then jumped to 21.3% in June. In July 2023, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that it would suspend disclosure of the numbers while it reassessed its methodology.
“The main reason is the economy and society are continually developing. Statistics work needs to keep improving,” said bureau spokesperson Fu Linghui.
That is true, of course. Or maybe the politicians didn’t like the numbers.
In July 2024, Türkiye’s main opposition, the Republican People’s Party, laid criminal complaints against the country’s statistics body, TurkStat, accusing it of underreporting inflation figures.
Other countries have had the same disputes over statistics. The key thing is for professionals to come together, fix the issue and ensure that the bureau of statistics is insulated from political shenanigans.
You can imagine how some politicians in our government, tired of the criticism that they have failed to curb unemployment, would be only too happy to embrace Fourie’s theory. Employment & labour minister Nomakhosazana Meth has already endorsed it.
“What if the way we measure unemployment is not just analytically contested but structurally flawed?” she mused in an opinion piece on News24. “South Africa’s massive informal sector fundamentally challenges standard unemployment metrics. Millions officially classified as ‘unemployed’ are actively engaged in vital, though precarious, economic activities.”
Is she trying to absolve herself of her failure?
Minister of trade, industry & competition Parks Tau told parliament: “I also hold the view that there is a significant undercount, particularly if you take into account the informal sector.”
I do think Fourie and the two ministers have a point and are correct to raise it, but I don’t want either of these groups interfering with Stats SA. The body has for the past 31 years done some incredible work — and some shockingly shoddy work, as we saw with Census 2022, which missed its deadline and was widely panned as flawed and unreliable.
What we need is an independent process — and this has been undertaken before by Stats SA — periodically looking at whether we are capturing all the nuances of the economy when measuring employment. But we absolutely must not allow the statistical service to become a slave to the political or business classes.
Imagine what will happen to the numbers when Jacob Zuma becomes president in 2029.
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