Statistician-general Risenga Maluleke says the data from Census 2022, which has come under scrutiny by some scientists for being unreliable, will not be revised as revisions are not in line with statistical practice.
Despite there being an undercount of 31% in the data collected on mortality, fertility, labour and income, Maluleke said on Friday the data remained relevant as the enumeration reports, which measure the quality of the data, had been released.
“Any of us who have taken pictures 20 years ago, if we take a picture today it won’t be the same,” Maluleke said while explaining to parliament’s portfolio committee on planning, monitoring & evaluation that standard statistical procedures do not allow data to be revised once it has been declared.
Flawed census data can materially affect financial allocations to municipalities and provinces, which need to be based on reliable data.
“Our [Stats SA] job is to count, it’s not to estimate. If, for whatever reason, we were to go back and count now we would not be able to confirm what was in the field in 2022,” Maluleke said.
Business Day previously reported that the Medical Research Council’s scrutiny of the latest census data called it a “work of fiction”, partly because of the overstated population number, which affects government planning.
Stats SA previously stood by the integrity of Census 2022, and attributed the high undercount of some data to the challenges of running a census during the coronavirus pandemic and the rush to get the job done due to the Treasury’s refusal to let it roll unspent census funds over from 2021/22 to the next fiscal year.
The 2011 census had an undercount of 14%, which was already high by international standards. The 31% undercount was the highest recorded to date by the UN Population Division.
The work of collecting data for the 2022 census began in 2019, but budget cuts and the Covid-19 disruptions led to the agency deviating from field work to collecting data using digital methods and telephonic interviews.
Another disruption included the 2021 local government elections, held in November of that year, which coincided with Stats SA’s original plan to conduct the census.
“We could not be in the same space as politicians and councillors who were criss-crossing the country, so we asked the census to be moved to November 2022 because the previous the census [was] conducted in October,” Maluleke said. “We knew that when we went to the field, we would be facing a high undercount because everything we had planned was disrupted,” Maluleke said.
With Tamar Khan
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