Twenty-nine years after its change of name in 1998 from the Central Statistical Service (CSS) to its new identity, Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) stands beyond any shadow of doubt as one of the best-run institutions of the state. It is a paragon of trust and a steadfast upholder of the United Nations Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics (UNFPOS). Yet as we stand on this precipice of credibility, the winds of disinformation are gathering, driven not by the state, but by private interests masquerading as public insight.
In a webinar held on December 11 this year, the Friends of Official Statistics (FOS) — a global group of veteran retirees from statistical operations — convened to consider the existential threats to the institution of UNFPOS. To foreground our discussion, Hermann Habermann, a veteran of the US Federal Statistics System (FSS) and former director of the United Nations Statistics Division, led with a paper titled “The Trauma of the Federal Statistical System”. His preamble was chilling: “Since January 2025, the United States Federal Statistics System has been undergoing severe and significant trauma.
Other countries are experiencing similar experiences … the activity in the US provides a test case to examine what responses, if any, the FSS can employ in the face of turmoil.” It was as though Habermann was offering the comfort of company to South Africa. While Stats SA has, to its benefit, largely escaped raw vitriol from political principals, it has received a spectrum of vengeance exclusively from white men in the private and academic sectors.
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Albeit by all counts the best institution of the state in the service of statecraft, Stats SA has not been immune from these sporadic attacks. The record shows this antagonism has been notably racialised, emanating from white male professionals. It is not immediately clear why the attacks have taken this specific racial character, but we must differentiate the attackers, lest we diffuse excellence into a bottomless pit of mediocrity.
First, there are the intellectual career critics, most notably professorsRob Dorrington and Tom Moultrieof the University of Cape Town. These men have been the sharpest critics of the demographics Stats SA produces. After every census, these two professors — who often had an inside lane in evaluations — would inevitably produce a minority report.
In the censuses of 2011 and 2022, they repeated the skepticism that the veteran Prof Dorrington displayed in 1996 and 2001. A notable exception occurred in 2011, when they pressured me to postpone the release of the Census results to satisfy their intellectual curiosity. I refused.
They had abandoned ship for personal work-related reasons, making it impossible for them to camp at Stats SA for the prolonged period required to evaluate the census properly. I decided they had gone Awol. The Statistics Council and I were not short of independent expert evaluators mobilised locally and internationally.
While their critiques were rooted in science, they were often crafted in the laboratory of imagination, far removed from the lived reality of the count. The second group of experts are those who commit fatal errors in interpreting data within a relational database. Here, we find the lateMike SchusslerandLoane Sharpe.
Schussler, a great friend of mine who read Stats SA data from back to front, would often unleash interesting critiques but suffered from schoolboy limitations. One of the most ridiculous missives Schussler threw at me involved arguing against sacrosanct rules of counting. He counted the frequency of visits into South Africa as a basis for estimating the population of Lesotho.
Alas, the headline screamed: “More than the entire Lesotho population cross borders into South Africa.” Making such a rudimentary error displays ignorance of the rules of counting in a relational database structure: the difference between one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationships. Schussler counted the event (the border crossing) rather than the entity (the person). After buying me a lousy meal at the airport in Bloemfontein, Schussler would say to me, “Pali, you know without Stats SA I am out of business, mate.” We laughed loudly.
But the error remained. Sharpe of Adcorp committed a similar sin with his so-called “Adcorp Index of Employment”. Like Schussler, he failed to use his recruitment brokerage data correctly to contest national numbers.
Sharpe’s index was counting the number of jobs (contracts) his labour brokerage offered and translating that directly to individuals. Suddenly the number of employed people appeared vastly inflated. I had to lay down the law, and Sharpe’s index withered away like ether.
In both instances, the “shotgun, own-data-on-the-shelf” approach could not stand the test against the robust methodologies of the mighty Stats SA. But these men never give up. They reincarnate their interests in different forms. Nature allows no vacuum.
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