Chairperson, Statistics South Africa plays a vital role in our economy and has a number of important functions to perform. These functions are both tangible and intangible. They are also quantitative and qualitative. Stats SA is strongly symbolic of what we need to achieve in South Africa: we need to examine and understand our past, learn its valuable lessons, and focus on the future.
The crucial intangible role of Stats SA is to ensure that it transmits credible economic data to South Africans, who participate in our local economy every day, and to foreign participants, who can choose to invest in and trade with a vast array of competitor economies across the world. During the debate last year, I raised the DA's concern that when the size of government was, unnecessarily, increased with the establishment of a Ministry in the Presidency for the National Planning Commission, the executive authority of Stats SA was transferred from the Minister of Finance to the Minister in the Presidency: National Planning Commission and that there was no clarity on how Parliament would hold Statistics SA to account. The Standing Committee on Finance appeared to be involved with the strategy and budget of Stats SA at the whim of the Minister and necessitated by the requirement for Parliament to approve its budget. The DA proposed that a committee should be established to provide oversight over the Presidency to remove this uncertainty. This remains our position.
In his presentation to the Standing Committee on Finance, the Minister explained at length that the work of Stats SA is independent and that neither the Minister nor his colleagues in the executive can manipulate the numbers, as was evidenced in other economies during the crisis that triggered the Great Recession, from which the global economy has not yet recovered.
The DA does not doubt the sincerity of the Minister. His track record in developing our National Treasury into one of the strongest fiscal units in the world, with a highly competent and dedicated team able to maintain fiscal discipline in an extremely noisy environment, speaks for itself. But nothing stays the same forever. Executives change, as do Ministers, and not always for the better. Given the current design of the national planning model, Stats SA must inform the output of the National Planning Commission and not the other way around. There must be no room for confusion over the independence of Stats SA and its interface with the National Planning Commission. We also need clarity on how Statistics SA interfaces with the advisory panel of the Department of Economic Development, if at all. Given this complexity, the Standing Committee on Finance, despite being a highly functional committee, cannot effectively provide this oversight.
The work of Stats SA is made far more difficult under prevailing circumstances, where participants in our economy are not entirely sure where economic policy is being formulated within government and the direction the policy will take. In particular, mixed signals over nationalisation of the mines and noise about tighter control over the banking sector increase uncertainty and perceived risks in our economy.
Stats SA does not formulate economic policy, but it does measure the impact of policy and will identify the pattern emerging from the numbers it generates. To be effective, Stats SA needs to input its findings into appropriate policy development while the data is fresh and relevant. This will enhance its credibility and demonstrate the value that Stats SA can add to our developing economy.
The tangible work of Stats SA is to support participants to make sense of the economic world in which they operate. Stats SA gives life to the numbers that populate the economic indicators that direct economic activity every day. Its five-year Strategic Plan from 2010-11 to 2014-15 concludes that Stats SA's central tenet is to promote the use of statistical information for evidence-based decisions and to deepen and expand the evidential knowledge base for society and thereby increase society's understanding of social and economic phenomena.
This is not an easy objective to achieve, especially within a turbulent socioeconomic environment. The promised Poverty Line Index was never developed but replaced with a range of other instruments to measure the extent of poverty in South Africa. These should inform us about the levels and causes of poverty so that progress on improvement could be monitored and the impact, or not, of policy interventions could be determined. Much more attention should be focused on poverty alleviation and reduction, and Stats SA should collect and disseminate the necessary statistics.
One of the Millennium Development Goals, MDGs, is to halve poverty by 2014. Although the Living Conditions Survey, LCS, will be concluded, how will we know whether poverty reduction has been achieved if the appropriate measurement instruments are not in place? It is already clear that the objective to halve unemployment is not on track and is highly unlikely to be achieved unless significant policy changes are made to lift the existing, extremely heavy barriers to job creation imposed by inappropriate job-crushing economic policies.
One of the key lessons from the Great Recession is that asymmetrical information can distort an economic system to the extent that it cannot self-correct and under such circumstances economic activity slows down until, without intervention, millions more individuals are driven into unemployment, poverty and despair.
The role of government in this process is ensuring that the economic system is functional, and intervening to facilitate and stimulate economic activity so that individuals can pursue opportunities to improve their own lives and those of future generations. To create jobs, a government must make the environment easier for economic activity to thrive and for entrepreneurial activity to germinate, take root, and grow.
Service delivery protests are a tangible measurement of the people's frustration at being deprived of services to which they are entitled and that government policy intervention is not yielding the desired results. The people have been patient, but they won't wait forever and powerful feedback from the people to government through protest action cannot be ignored.
Stats SA's strategic plan makes reference to a new era for statistical development, resulting from the need for evidence-based policy-making. This means that Stats SA needs to go beyond providing a quantitative statistic and ask the qualitative questions - why a phenomenon yields a particular result and what action is required to encourage the statistic to move in the right direction.
Expanding the statistical information base by increasing its depth, breadth and geographical spread lies at the core of Stats SA's strategy to lead and co-ordinate the provision of relevant, reliable and quality statistical information to measure the social, cultural and economic welfare of all South Africans.
In its work programme for 2011-12 Stats SA sets out the detail of its seven programmes and nine key priorities. The statistical process, identified in its generic value chain, is complex and relies on the administration that supplies the data. In its presentation to the committee last year, Stats SA expressed its concern over the reliability of these secondary data sources and pointed out the declining trust and confidence in public institutions and weak planning across the three spheres of government.
Given that Statistics SA must co-ordinate statistical planning, production and reporting among organs of state, interdepartmental collaboration to improve the quality of statistics available for policy-making decisions is a welcome step in the right direction. More comprehensive statistics on safety, education and health can enrich the debate on how to achieve the most benefit from the application of limited resources. Progress on the implementation of the South African National Statistics System will facilitate this process.
More in-depth demographic and social analysis is required to understand and monitor migration patterns. Our ancestors have been migrating for millions of years, and this phenomenon is not going to stop now, no matter how many obstacles are placed in its way. Quite simply, people move around, sometimes in a trickle and sometimes in a flood. We need to measure it, monitor it and ensure that policies reflect the appropriate reality.
Our population today is estimated at approximately 50 million people. Census 2011 will provide an opportunity to determine how many people are actually resident in South Africa, where they are located and their living conditions. The most recent census was conducted a decade ago in October 2001. Statistics SA had originally hoped to release results in October 2002, within a year of completing the enumeration. The key results were only released in July 2003 and full data sets were made available to the public at the end of 2003. A range of unforeseen problems caused delays at different stages of the process. The preparation by Stats SA to date will hopefully prevent a repeat of the problems encountered and avoid the resultant concern over the validity of the outcome. The DA fully supports the census project and will encourage everyone in South Africa to make themselves available for enumeration. We agree that the chairperson of the Standing Committee on Finance will look very good in a yellow suit. [Laughter.]
Management theory argues that if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it. In 2008, the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress was appointed by Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of the Republic of France, in response to concerns about the adequacy of current measures of economic performance, especially those based on figures for Gross Domestic Product, GDP, and concerns about the relevance of the GDP figures as measures of economic, environmental and social sustainability.
The subsequent report by Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi suggests that trying to capture what is going on in our society with a set of numbers that is too small can be grossly misleading. They recommended the development of better measures of economic performance in a complex economy; a shift in emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people's wellbeing; considering objective and subjective dimensions of wellbeing; a pragmatic approach towards measuring sustainability; and physical indicators for environmental pressures.
The report concludes that the issue is indeed complex - more complex than the already complicated issue of measuring current wellbeing or performance. The lesson for Stats SA is to keep abreast of developments on the cutting edge of statistical analysis and evolve statistical methods and indicators over time to ensure that they measure what really matters.
Stats SA also needs to consider several unanswered questions about our economy, essential for policy-making, such as: How big is the informal sector? How much illicit trading is happening in our economy? Are reports on illicit financial trade flows from our economy correct? How big is the mismatch between earned and declared income in our economy?
Although Stats SA still has much work to do, it is improving over time. Stats SA enriches the economic debate and improves efficiency through its provision of quality information. It is a valuable national asset that serves us well in our quest to improve the lives of all the people in South Africa and its efforts are greatly appreciated. [Applause.]