It goes without saying that President Cyril Ramaphosa absolutely hates the quarterly release of South Africa’s unemployment figures. Nothing makes the government look more incompetent than the unemployment figures.
The most recent release of the numbers by statistician-general Risenga Maluleke made one want to weep: the unemployment rate in the first quarter of 2025 stood at 32.9%.
Ramaphosa, bless him, did not fire Maluleke. With all his faults, Ramaphosa knows that firing Maluleke will not change the reality that unemployment is at unsustainable levels in South Africa. He knows statistics are sacrosanct. You cannot change them just because you don’t like them. You can’t fire the statistician just because you don’t like the numbers. Doing so is illogical and anti-science.
When US President Donald Trump summarily fired the country’s bureau of labour statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer on Friday, just hours after the agency reported that job growth in the US had slowed to a near-halt, he once again demonstrated his anti-science credentials. Without any evidence, Trump accused McEntarfer of being a political appointee who was manipulating jobs data.
“We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform. McEntarfer’s sin is that the bureau had reported a gain of just 73,000 nonfarm jobs in July, a figure that was below market expectations.
What is the secret of US success? A huge chunk of it is the sanctity of its institutions. An entity such as the bureau derives its credibility from producing data that businesses, economists, academics, policymakers and ordinary people can use with the full knowledge that it was produced not to please any group but to be of help in policy and decision-making.
It is a huge red flag when a country begins to manipulate data to suit a political narrative and please a political leader. A notorious recent example is Argentina, which, after a financial crisis, fired its top statistician in charge of calculating the consumer price index. Between 2007 and 2015, the Argentine government just made up inflation numbers. The subterfuge contributed to the debt crisis that resulted in the country’s default on its international obligations in 2014.
South Africa saw an example of the US’s retreat from nonpartisan facts and figures when the presidents of the two countries met at the White House in May. Trump produced a picture from the Democratic Republic of Congo to buttress his false claim of a “white genocide” in South Africa. He showed a video of Julius Malema, an opposition leader, as “proof” of this genocide. Malema is not a South Africa government official. There is no white genocide. Trump was making up his own “facts”.
As The New York Times’s Peter Baker put it: “Government officials who deal in data now fear they have to toe the line or risk losing their jobs. Career scientists, longtime intelligence analysts and nonpartisan statisticians who serve every president regardless of political party with neutral information on countless matters, such as weather patterns and vaccine efficacy, now face pressure as never before to conform to the alternative reality enforced by the president and his team.”
There are many expressions used to describe countries that fire statisticians because politicians don’t like the numbers. “Banana republic” is one of them.
So what does the world look like for South Africa now that the US has chosen to go on the attack against facts and statistics?
The Institute for Security Studies Africa makes for some interesting modelling that I would recommend to any policymaker and business reflecting on its medium- and long-term operations locally and globally.
“Around 2043, China will overtake the US as the single most powerful country in the world ... though the West remains dominant in wealth, technology and power for the remainder of the 21st century and will continue to benefit inordinately from a rules-based system created in its image, its ability to shape and maintain that order is rapidly declining,” the institute predicts. “Other trends include populism and its domestic effects, power diffusion in the West, and global decoupling favouring regionalism. Rather than a new uni- or even bipolar order, the international trend is towards a complex, multipolar power configuration.”
The year 2043 is just 18 years away. Blink and it will be here.
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