ON THE MONEY
STUART THEOBALD: We must ensure Stats SA has independent, credible captain after Lehohla bows out
Statistics SA must be run by people with integrity, independence of mind and appropriate skills
Pravin Gordhan and Mcebisi Jonas reiterated their call last week for South Africans to defend the institutions of state, particularly those that fall within the purview of the finance minister. The Reserve Bank, Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) and Public Investment Corporation (PIC) are top of the list. But to those institutions, the former finance minister and his deputy added Statistics SA. While statistics is generally thought of as dispassionate and objective facts about the world, it has a highly political role to play. Politicians use statistics, as the Scottish writer Andrew Lang once quipped, as "the way a drunken man uses lamp posts; for support rather than illumination". President Jacob Zuma has had very little support of this sort. His presidency has seen the constant upward creep of unemployment figures and downward creep in the growth rate of the economy. Unemployment has climbed from 23.2% to 27.7%. The GDP growth rate regularly outperformed the global average unti...
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