Zapiro makes a meal of the census.
In 2001 he was excited by the question of where one slept on the night of the 9th of October waking into the morning of the 10th of October. He could not wait to dramatise it through his illustrious cartoons.
It was in 2001 Census of South Africa that I was reminded of the Census of Bophuthatswana of 1985, where during the processing of the data I could not help but recognise the details of a university colleague that related to where the colleague spent the census night of the 4th waking up into the morning of the 5th of March 1985.
The census does not process names of people and the records are pulped after a legislatively stipulated time. Eleven years later I met the colleague at a nightclub on my visit in1996 to Lesotho, while preparing for the first post-apartheid census in South Africa.
I made a mental recollection of the incident and recalled with great clarity that statistics is a conduit of trust and only those who can be trusted are entrusted with the details of everyone. What took place in 1985 on that census night is a matter that remains where it happened. What I read and saw in the record remained at the data processing centre.
Last week Risenga Maluleke, the Statistician-General of South Africa, said he would be announcing the 2022 Census results next month on the 10th of October. This is a historic moment that will reveal where South Africans slept on the night of the 1st waking up into the 2nd of February 2022.
Tradition has been established of asking the successive post-apartheid presidents to receive the report based on where South Africans slept on the census night.
President Cyril Ramaphosa will thus launch the numbers after the Statistician-General has announced them publicly.
The duty of the head of state of encouraging society to engage the statistics has been established.
In 1998 President Nelson Mandela received the 1996 Census numbers after they were publicly announced, and he launched them. It was so with President Thabo Mbeki in 2003 on the occasion of the announcement of Census 2001 and in 2012 too President Jacob Zuma launched the results after the Statistician-General announced them.
The question in the census of where South Africans slept on the night between 1st and 2nd February 2022, has nothing to do with establishing sleeping patterns of post-Covid-19 traumatised society. It all has to do with a point of reference for a count.
Ideally, it would have been good to say to everyone at midnight between the night of the 1st and 2nd of February record your details and file them with the statistics office. But that would be a difficult feat to muster. So, the bean counters ask you to make a mental record of where you were at that point and when the counter comes, your point of reference is that point where you were. Obviously, some may be at a nightclub or at work.
But Maluleke asks further questions about facilities in your place where you were on that night. His questions cover the material of construction for the house, number of rooms, source of energy and water. A nightclub may not be an ideal space against which these can be recorded, so where you slept and ideally woke up in the morning is the relevant space associated with these facilities.
Out of these revelations, then an aggregation of relationships of husband, wife, father daughter or son or living together are established. Seventy-five questions are asked. Fifty of these are personal. These are age, sex, level of education, marital status, occupation and employment status and children born for example. Another 25 are about facilities in the place you woke up from on the morning of the 2nd. These include electricity, water and rooms for example.
So, where you woke up matters because it answers the question on the state of services the public are exposed to where they woke up.
The mounting and delivery of the fourth post-apartheid census is a milestone in the life of Statistics South Africa, the fact finder of the nation. This is especially so on the eve of a national election that says goodbye to the sixth administration and ushers the seventh administration. A lot will be reflected in the numbers.
Combined with historic time series data from censuses themselves, surveys and especially the income and expenditure survey leave South Africans spoilt for choice. They are well served with a bounty of data and cannot claim to have not known.
Although some might not wish that it be known or reveal where they slept on that night between the 1st and 2nd of February 2022, you need not worry, your details are not going to be revealed, only aggregates will be reported upon. All those working in the census are sworn to an oath of secrecy.
These numbers are not about Zapiro’s appetite for entertaining gossip or Lehohla’s best kept memory of the 1985 Bophuthatswana Census. They represent a tapestry of a nation that is three decades old and confronts a myriad of challenges. The Census is a true mirror of the nation. Let us hold it close to witness and do something to confront the contours of our struggle.
Dr Pali Lehohla is the director of the Economic Modelling Academy, a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a Research Associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former Statistician-General of South Africa
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