Chairperson, hon Minister, hon members and officials, I stand here today, confidently making the bold statement that South Africa is my home. I know this because I have the information and the numbers to prove it.
Stats SA gives us information and numbers that help us to know and understand our country much better. It is one of our most important institutions in nation-building and a crucial element in strengthening the capacity of the developmental state to pursue its strategic goals. As we roll up our sleeves in our various fields in society to pursue our most important national task, that of job creation, we look to Stats SA to give us correct and reliable numbers and information for planning, monitoring and evaluation to show how far we have gone on this mission.
Since it is a knowledge institution, Stats SA contributes towards job creation through value-adding in areas such as the provision of reliable data, analytical capacity to the state and society, and skills development. It is a sad fact to accept that South Africa is faced with the massive challenge of skills shortages in most of the crucial areas that are important in growing our economy and reducing unemployment, such as statisticians and others in quantitative fields.
For our goal of job creation to be achieved at the targeted pace we have set for ourselves, we will have to urgently focus attention on skills and capacity development in this field. It is encouraging and welcoming to note that Stats SA has identified and addressed the statistical skills capacity gap. As one of the priorities of its Strategic Overview of 2007 to 2014, it is planning, over the medium term, to focus on developing human capacity through its internship, learnership and school programmes; establishing a statistics training institute and partnering with tertiary institutions; investing in information capital by modernising the way the organisation conducts its business, including restructuring the way data and information are developed and managed; and creating a positive organisational culture and management ethos that are able to embrace and drive change.
By placing training as one of its priorities, as demonstrated in this programme, Stats SA has shown that it is recognising the magnitude of the problem in respect of the lack of a sufficient supply of statistical skills in South Africa, and therefore its efforts must be supported.
The ANC, as the governing party, is fully behind the organisational programme for internships, learnerships, schools programmes and establishing a statistics training institution and partnering with tertiary institutions, because of our long-established commitment towards skills development in the country, as demonstrated by our policies.
We, as the ANC movement, believe that the role of a developmental state in skills development is not only through financing but, most importantly, by facilitating the acquisition of practical experience of graduates, as well as the provision of training on site, through government departments, especially state institutions such as Stats SA, public entities and state- owned enterprises.
As a movement, we have placed this as one of our key priorities upon which we were elected into government in 2009. To amplify this, we had thus resolved at our 52nd National Conference in 2007 to invest in priority skills and education, including the following: improving our performance in mathematics, science and technology; significantly expanding the resources devoted to our capacity as a people for knowledge production; and expanding resources devoted to innovation and research.
It is within this policy framework that we must encourage Stats SA to play a central role in developing the skills of our children and the youth in all the fields of statistics. The offices and building of Stats SA should become friendly spaces open to learners and the public for knowledge acquisition, and for gaining access to information about the state of the country. Stats SA must play a leading role in demystifying statistics in the minds of the South African public. This is so important at this stage of our development, because without proper statistical literacy and awareness, it would be easy for our democratic gains to be reversed.
Statistics are part and parcel of our ideological battle in society. They can be used appropriately for development, but they can also be abused in an ideological manner on an unsuspecting population. This is currently manifested by the influx of so-called studies containing all manner of statistical information, which have been strategically released in the period leading up to the local government elections. Although some of them are genuine and reliable in respect of informing the public about the state of our conditions and to assist the public to make better electoral choices, there is no way of knowing which ones are not the best, which ones are the worst, or which ones are biased.
Stats SA should be the one institution that we can rely on if we are to test the reliability of these statistics and the results of studies. It can do so by promoting the statistical literacy of the people, improving statistical education, and becoming more accessible and user-friendly in its information products.
On the basis of its commitment to this mission of skills and capacity development in the fields of statistics, we must support the Stats SA Budget Vote. It constitutes an important value-add towards the promotion of job creation and nation-building. [Applause.]