Census data doesn't add up

Catastrophic’ as it excludes income and earnings; mortality and fertility.

- Faizel Patel

The failure of Census 2022 to produce accurate data has direct implications for policies and interventions to benefit the lives of all South Africans and the DA says the situation is so catastrophic that the whole exercise should be rerun.

Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) this week admitted that valuable data collected from its Census 2022 is fundamentally flawed and not of good enough quality to be released for official or public use.

Amid questions about the data's credibility, Stats SA released an updated version of its publication Census 2022 in Brief, which now excludes income and earnings, labour and employment, and mortality and fertility.

The data was scheduled to be release later this month. The exclusion of the data amplifies the concerns previously raised by University of Cape Town demographers, Tom Moultrie and Rob Dorrington, about its integrity.

Speaking to Saturday Citizen, Moultrie said the implications of the flawed data is huge.

"The problems came from the very start when they revealed in October last year, that there's been a 31% undercount, which is a world record for undercount censuses where they've tried to estimate what that undercount is.

"It is more than double the amount of the undercount in 2011 at the time of the last census.

"The fact that they're not even releasing the data points to a greater scale of the problems in the census and which kind of amplifies our concerns about the census results," Moultrie said.

The flawed census data does raise concerns over the allocation of resources across South Africa, he said.