Fibretime, a private fibre-network operator, has questioned South Africa’s official population baseline, saying its own data and new remote sensing techniques suggest the country’s population could be substantially understated.
The company, which is active in townships and peri-urban areas, builds and operates fibre infrastructure. It published an analysis on its public site arguing that extrapolations from its network rollout, combined with aerial imaging, drone footage and AI modelling, point to a population figure that tops 95-million.
The company, founded by Alan Knott-Craig, said it used its operational sample — more than 250,000 homes connected and planning data for more than 2-million — along with government sources to arrive at the estimate.
“Every time we go into a township — and we’ve worked in 32 townships and nine cities across the country — we do a physical count of homes. Because we count every home, we see the reality on the ground. Each time, the number of homes we find is almost double what the government records show," Knott-Craig told Business Day.
“After surveying 39 townships, with another 30 in planning, we realised the official national population figure looks too low. Using rigorous data science — aerial imaging, drone footage, AI and careful extrapolation from our rollout samples — and adjusting for migration to avoid double-counting, we arrived at a range of estimates,“ he said.
“We’re not declaring a definitive number; we’re asking whether the population could be as high as 95-million, and our top‑end estimate is 124-million.”
The claim, which was first reported by Moneyweb, comes as private sector leaders have questioned headline statistics. Earlier this year, Capitecoutgoing CEO Gerrie Fourie suggested the unemployment rate may overstate joblessness because it does not fully capture informal and self-employed activity.
Stress test
Fibretime’s assertion is a stress test for an underfunded national statistics agency. Early last month, Business Day reported that the Statistics Council — a 25-member panel that signs off on national statistics — warned that high vacancy rates and a shrinking operational budget are undermining its functioning.
Concerns about data quality are not new. The Medical Research Council last year described the 2022 census as “a work of fiction”, saying that it overstated the population and that there had been a 31% undercount in mortality and labour data.
Stats SA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Fibretime’s claim, though has previously stood by its census. Still, repeated challenges to headline statistics heap pressure on Stats SA and can erode confidence.
Knott-Craig linked the company’s operations counts to planning consequences, arguing that most “missing” people are unregistered South Africans rather than migrants.
“As an infrastructure company, we plan networks using official statistics, so if those stats are wrong, it affects decisions about schools, hospitals and roads. If the population were 95-million, that would mean roughly 33-million more people than currently counted — and most of those would not be undocumented immigrants but South Africans who have simply not been registered,” he said.
“Many children born in townships are never registered and therefore don’t appear in official records. This undercounting has been compounding for decades, and it means we are not planning properly for the people who actually live here.”
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