Effective policies to combat South Africa’s plight require good ideas, resources and political will. They also, however, need to build on a solid understanding of the problem in the first place. How can defects in the labour market be tackled if we don’t know what’s actually going on there? Good and relevant statistics are central to effective policies.
Immediately after apartheid ended, South Africa’s statisticians tried to move away from the traditional definition of unemployment. For instance, they experimented with various more extended definitions of unemployment that would capture what they now call the “discouraged work seekers”., the country’s appetite for statistical creativity has slowly waned. It has increasingly embraced the ill-fitting international standard.
The other problem with existing definitions is that nuance tends to fall by the wayside. Take “discouraged work seeker”. It’s an ambiguous category. Whether you qualify depends on your own judgement: maybe you don’t look for a job actively, but would you like one. Not everyone answering “no” is voluntarily jobless. And people might answer “yes” even though they indeed lack personal effort to find work.
South Africa faces a genuine dilemma in its statistics. It is impossible to capture the complex ills of its economy and society in single headline figures. Such numbers, and the colourful graphs they generate, ready to be tweeted, are tempting. But all too often, embracing this strategy biases the numbers against people who fall between the cracks.
Only those who gather and release the so-called unemployment data for StatSSA believe that an economy whose 'growth' has been stagnant around 1% for ages can have a 27% rate of unemployment.