Opening Address by the Minister of Finance

Hon. Trevor Manuel

Indicators Workshop to monitor national development plans

Master of Ceremonies let me welcome you all to this august session on indicators for monitoring national development. In so doing I need to make a special mention of the following: PARIS21,(i.e., Partnership in statistics for development in the 21st Century), invited guests on the African continent, SADC representatives , United Nations teams, DFID, Statistics Sweden, with whom Stats SA has a long relationship, Directors General and Heads of Departments you are most welcome to this interesting part of our country.

Statistics and politics are interesting partners, they are old bedfellows, in fact state facts, i.e., statistics are born out of politics. The idea of partnership in statistics for development in the 21st Century is therefore an appealing one. And I will suggest that politics is the parent partner in this relationship. In fact, the Handbook on the Operation and Organisation of a Statistical Agency in 2001, asset the following that: “By its very nature, statistics is of special interest to governments.”[1]

The President of the Federal Statistics of Germany, Johan Hahlen, in his opening address at the conference on policies and statistics in the European Union in October 1999, argued that they experience a specific conflict between statistics and politics. The conflict is that on the one hand, great demands are made on official statistics, on the timeliness of the data, while on the other hand our resources, be it in terms of personnel, be it in terms of finance, are not increased but reduced. “We have to knit a bigger and bigger pullover with less and less wool”[2], he argued. I say welcome to the club.

I believe that this partnership amongst others, is the basis for rationalising what resources, in what quantities should be directed to which priorities. Without this partnership the specific conflict has no opportunity of being understood and can at best only result in failure to address it in a rational manner.

My experience is that statisticians have a tendency of talking to themselves in mystifying ways, and they do this with a clock that is ten times slower than reality and they tend to come up with answers that fail to answer that reality. This situation puts policy makers in an unenviable position. I see this partnership therefore as an important beginning and it should address the synchronisation of the political time and the statistical time, including statistical relevance to policy, as well as the requisite resourcing, training and funding.

Master of Ceremonies, we are proud to say today that the admission of South Africa into the community of nations marks progress in the destiny of humanity. As we take our rightful position in the community of nations we are beginning to define a new reality for ourselves. The past seven years have witnessed this relentless efforts towards the goal of addressing poverty, disease and ignorance, mobilising for a better world order, including advocacy for cancellation of third world debt for the Highly Indebted and Poor Countries.

The question is who defines progress, who defines human destiny, how do we measure all these things. Some of the indicators are well developed within their own systems, while others are fussy. Fellegi, the Chief Statistician for Canada, with regard to the more fussy type indicators, aptly puts across the following: “It is through the political process that democratic societies achieve social consensus in indicator domains that are intrinsically judgmental.”[3] This workshop indeed comes at the right time to provide guidance on these matters. Our President has recently asked the question: Can South Africa provide me with a picture reflecting on seven years of democracy? The belated beginnings of answering this question are with you. Here again the statistical clock is out of sync with the political one. We need to synchronise these time zones and fast. This is not only at the temporal level but at the level of content and priorities.

In determining which indicators to choose, tradeoffs have to be made. In this regard, information about emergent issues of public concern that would require statistical information become important. Furthermore there are indicators that require smaller geographic breakdown for informing policy and the question of reliability of regional statistics and their management is important. There are yet another set of indicators that attract the public eye, such as employment, consumer price indices and poverty.

Identifying and defining indicators within a national context in a regionalising and globalising economy and politics can pose a major challenge. While the choice of aggregated indicators require to take into account technical considerations, they should however not be determined purely by technical merits, but should relate and be relevant for use on areas of immediate concern. This is so because, some of these indicators may not currently exist for parts of regions, yet measurement and estimates for a range of social concerns and considerations have to be made. These considerations should be underlined by perfect transparency so that users can be best informed of what the underlying considerations for these indicators are.

As a Minister of Finance I am aware that those like myself are keenly interested amongst others, on indicators of major demand aggregates, such as consumption and savings, disposition of consumers to purchase locally produced versus imported goods, labour markets and how we can improve production levels. Other ministries could be focused on the supply side. For instance the Ministry of Transport would be interested in road safety, the adequacy of airports and often times these ministries look at the detailed regulatory framework of their entities. The Ministry of Education could focus on quality of education and its effectiveness.

The effects of the market economy and deregulation on indicators have been felt much more severely in those countries where planning was centralised. However, these effects have also been felt where marketing boards existed and now were dismantled. The information architecture for these entities changes. The template for indicators should therefore be nimble and fast.

I trust that the main objectives of the workshop will be met namely to:

  • bring together key users and producers of official and other statistics to effect a user needs assessment in partnership;
  • identify the main indicators required to guide national development planning and decision-making;
  • use these indicators for monitoring and evaluation of key stakeholder, and especially government performance; and
  • have these indicators as basis of the work programme for agencies responsible for informing development planning and decision-making.

In conclusion I need only remind participants that your workshop comes as a result of the decision by the Cabinet Lekgotla of January 2001 who demanded from you to provide a picture of the country after seven years of democracy. More critically this workshop should provide us with a template of indicators, mechanisms of populating the template with content, and a management systems for accessing the template. In short we need a management tool to monitor and measure progress and evaluate performance. A tool to promote governance and transparency. A tool to hold ourselves to account. A tool to enable us to manage. When you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.

I trust that we will in future say Truths, Whole Truths and Statistics. Finally I should thank in particular PARIS21 for their generosity in co-sponsoring the workshop.

1

[1] Handbook on the Operation and Organisation of a Statistical Agency UNSD 2001

[2] Conference on policies and statistics in the European Union 1999

[3]Statistical methods discussion papers and new surveys on poverty and low income, Statistics Canada September 1997