Scientists slam Stats SA’s 2022 census as ‘work of fiction’

Scientists have torn into the government’s latest census, saying it is so flawed it cannot be relied on for allocating budgets and resources or monitoring the impact of key programmes such as childhood immunisation.

Stats SA’s 2022 census population estimate of 62-million people is overstated by a million people, and there are such material discrepancies at district and municipal level that the data is a “work of fiction”, said UCT demographer Tom Moultrie, one of the authors of a technical report on the census commissioned by the Medical Research Council (MRC).

This is a “matter of huge concern”, as government’s revenue distribution hinges on population estimates, he said.

A census is a count of the number of people in a country at a single point in time and is a crucial planning tool for the public and private sectors. It helps authorities decided where to build hospitals, schools and houses, and provides the denominator for researchers assessing the proportion of the population reached by government programmes. In SA, census data is used in government’s quarterly labour force survey and in the MRC’s work on the country’s burden of disease.

“The denominators are not fit for purpose,” said Moultrie.

Stats SA conducted the census at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, in February 2022. When it released the results on October 10 2023, it reported a 31% undercount, a figure almost twice the undercount reported for the 2011 census and the highest yet recorded by the UN Population Division. The census cost R3.2bn to run, and the next one is planned for 2031.

Stats SA’s adjustments for the undercount have resulted in population estimates that are full of anomalies and are inconsistent with data from other sources, such as previous censuses, national vital registration data (such as births and deaths), and data from the voters roll, the report reads.

It attributed the high undercount to the challenges of running a census during the pandemic and a rush to get the job done due to Treasury’s refusal to allow Stats SA to roll unspent census funds over from 2021/22 to the next fiscal year.

“It would appear Stats SA’s hand was forced,” said Moultrie.

Case study

The report includes a case study on Central Karoo’s biggest municipality, Beaufort West, the population of which, according to census 2022, grew 47.2% between 2011 and 2022, from 49,585 to 72,972 people. But satellite imagery shows only a slight increase in the number of dwellings in Beaufort West during this period, which cannot account for the increase in the population size.

Stats SA was not immediately available to comment, but has previously complained to parliament that budget cuts had left it so underfunded it couldn’t finance crucial projects such as the income and expenditure survey.

Treasury was also not immediately available to comment.

kahnt@businesslive.co.za