Stuart Theobald’s column on the differences between food inflation rates calculated by Shoprite and Stats SA contained revisionist history about the Capitec CEO’s 2025 comments on unemployment that needs challenging (“Shoprite inflation data challenges official statistics”, March 18).
Capitec did not “publish an analysis” about unemployment — its CEO made some comments to Business Day that were factually incorrect (specifically that Stats SA does not measure self-employment in the Quarterly Labour Force Survey [QLFS]), and then some more comments to another media outlet that only brought further embarrassment to him and no clarity to the rest of us.
In addition, Stats SA did not, as Theobald claims, revise its methodology due to the engagement with Capitec. Rather, some minor changes had already been planned and were then implemented — as Stats SA mentioned in an August 13 press release.
Stats SA’s tinkering did nothing to measure unemployment, and it is therefore wrong for Theobald to say the engagements produced a better system. They produced nothing useful.
I agree, though, that Stats SA is in bad shape. The 2022 population census’s very high nonresponse rate will affect the reliability of Stats SA household surveys and the divvying up of the local government equitable share for years to come.
The QLFS earnings data is a mess. Stats SA’s plans to put almost all its household survey eggs into the new current population survey basket starting in 2027 are very risky but forced on it by a reduced budget.
The solution should be more funding for Stats SA, conditional on the organisation acknowledging that some things have gone wrong and creating a viable plan to fix them that includes the wider government, academics, labour and business (perhaps excluding businesses whose leaders have already shown they have no expertise in statistics).
Andrew Kerr
School of Economics, University of Cape Town
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