BUDGET VOTE DEBATE- EXTENDED PUBLIC COMMITTEE
Vote 12: STATISTICS
National Assembly
Mr Narend Singh, MP
Inkatha Freedom Party
Madam Speaker, when I first arrived at Parliament, Stats SA (then known as Central Statistical Service) was headed by a chief director and was seen as a very insignificant department reporting to the minister of Home Affairs.
Today Stats SA is headed by the Statistician General on the level of a Director-General with several Deputy Director General’s and over 50 Chief Directors.
The reporting was moved to the Minister of Finance and now to the Minister in the Presidency. Over this period of time Stats SA has become one of the leading National Statistical Offices in the world, they have embraced technology and now conduct paperless surveys, with all data being electronically captured, thereby reducing the processing time to one month to the delivery of accurate results.
A large part of the credit must go to Dr Pali Lehohla, the Statistician General (SG) for South Africa. As most people recognise him as the man in the yellow suite.
Going forward the following are my concerns and Madam Speaker, we would like some clarity from the Minister in this regard:
Firstly, we note the large budget cut; How is this organization going to manage collecting crucial statistics that the country and world so desperately needs; Can you imagine when the GDP calculations are affected? And the negative effect this could have on South Africa when ratings agencies come calling and base their assessments on our credit worthiness as a country on sub-standard and incomplete statistical information.
Secondly, we have been hearing of the National Statistical system for several years but we cannot see any evidence of progress towards unifying all statistical data collection in our country. The SG is statistician general for all of South Africa and not only Stats SA, but where is the evidence of coordination with all National government departments?
Thirdly, the SG has served with distinction for over 15 years and is not getting younger, as we can see from the loss of hair, and will retire in a few years. Will the National Statistical Systems activities be completed during his tenure? And in this regard can the minister explain the succession planning that he has put in place at Stats SA?
Fourthly, todays key buzz words are ‘data mining’ with data scientists being categorized as the sexiest job. How is Stats SA addressing the data revolution? What are the plans to incorporate administrative and transactional data into official statistics? What training and capacity building does Stats SA provide for the data scientist or official statistician? some years ago there was talk of a training institute with registration with SAQA?
Fifthly, not enough is done for the dissemination of data, we spend millions of rand’s on collection but are the users benefitting from all this data? Even we as members of parliament need the data and the Minister should therefore consider a Stats SA dissemination office in Parliament, possibly next to the GCIS information Centre. The website is simply not enough as most South Africans either do not have access to the internet or do not have enough bandwidth on slow speed internet connections to download data. The data should be made available on DVD’s and memory sticks to facilitate ease-of-download for members and the greater public.
The same should apply to all our schools. We used to have a Census at schools, why was this terminated as the schools are a very important group of stakeholders, not only to use our data but they become respondents in a few years and thus will definitely improve data collections?
Finally, Stats SA should receive more funding so that they can collect more data at grassroots levels as many countries are moving towards collecting all of their data with a geo-spatial reference to time and space. The municipalities, especially the Metro’s require GDP and other economic data at their level and not just at provincial level, and this will require larger samples and thus more funding.
In conclusion we look forward to Stats SA continuing with their good work, continuing to embrace technology and continuing to provide data for evidence based decision making.
Madam speaker, we support this vote.
Contact:
Mr Narend Singh, MP
083 788 5954
IFP Media, Parliament
