The funding crisis at Stats SA came to a head on Tuesday as the body charged with safeguarding the country’s official statistics threatened to resign if the agency does not get more funding.
Stats SA produces a raft of important statistics on everything from consumer inflation, and unemployment numbers, to surveys on poverty and inequality. These are used to inform private sector planning and government’s policymaking and budgeting on crucial services such as health and education.
The SA Statistics Council is by law required to promote and safeguard official statistics.
It advises the minister responsible for planning, monitoring and evaluation in the presidency, Jackson Mthembu, and the head of Stats SA, statistician-general Risenga Maluleke. Stats SA was at "a tipping point", chair David Everatt said in a statement on Tuesday.
He later told Business Day that members agreed unanimously at a meeting last week that the government must inject funds into Stats SA or the council would withdraw its support for official statistics and resign.
Lobbying "behind the scenes" for the past year had not produced results, Everatt said.
While SAA, Eskom and other state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that have been crippled by corruption and maladministration have received billions of rand in state bailouts, the highly regarded Stats SA, which is headed for a national census in 2021, has been battling budget cuts and a vacancy rate of almost 20%,
"The implications of our resignation are quite profound for the economy ... but we don’t see that we have a choice any more," Everatt told Business Day.
The 20-member council must sign off on all official statistics or they are "effectively rendered meaningless".
"If we don’t give our support to the stats that the [statistician-general] releases, then there are no official statistics in SA," Everatt said.
The agency outclassed many developing country peers and produced data that informed how agencies such as the IMF assessed SA, as well as how credit-ratings agencies judged SA’s institutional strengths, said Econometrix chief economist Azar Jammine.
"The government relies on statistics to do everything and then at the same time doesn’t fund them properly. Instead money has been used bailing out SOEs, "rather than going towards a critical service that it needed to manage the economy better", Jammine said.
According to its most recent annual report, Stats SA’s baseline budget allocations were reduced by R141m in 2017/2018, R215m in 2018/2019, and R254m in 2019/2020 over the medium-term expenditure framework, much of which has had to come from staff compensation budgets. In the 2019 budget the government did allocate it an additional R3.2bn over the next three years for the 2021 census.
But "it does not mean Stats SA is functional", said Everatt. All that the government had provided for was the cost of rolling out the census.
"A census that has no Stats SA staff to analyse it, or run a post-enumerations survey is a waste of money," he said.
Vacancy rates at current levels and a continuing freeze on filling posts raised the risk of human error, Everatt said.
"If we were to release wrong statistics we would get absolutely clobbered by UN statistics, by the IMF, and the ratings agencies who follow the IMF," he said.
Maluleke had repeatedly highlighted Stats SA’s funding plight to parliament’s portfolio committee on public service & administration, performance monitoring and evaluation, said DA MP Solly Malatsi. Increasingly, its talent had been poached by international organisations, he said, and its overstretched staff were under an increasing burden as they headed intothe census.
"The lack of adequate funding impacts the important evidence-based research that guides government on how to allocate its resources," he said. It would come as "no surprise" if the council resigned, he said.
The Treasury declined to comment. Queries put to Stats SA were directed to the council.
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