'Make sure you count in Census 2022, it’s for your own good,' says Stats SA

Statistics SA has expressed concern over the low number of people participating in Census 2022.

“To those who are refusing to be enumerated, they need to know that this information is not for Stats SA, it is for themselves to use whether they want to venture into business or if they make use of it in their daily lives. It is also critical to hold accountable those that they elect into office,” said Stats SA statistician-general Risenga Maluleke.

Maluleke told MPs on Wednesday that the census was a full count of everyone who found themselves in SA.

“There are people, especially illegal immigrants, who are shying away from being enumerated,” said Maluleke.

Stats SA was among three departments that briefed the portfolio committee on public service and administration on the first, second and third quarter performance for the 2021/2022 financial year.

Maluleke’s office was joined by the department of planning, monitoring & evaluation and Brand SA, all of which report to minister in the presidency Mondli Gungubele.

Maluleke said the organisations’ financial performance was affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic also caused the fourth census, which kicked off in February, to be postponed in October last year.  

He said during the third wave a decision was taken not to deploy field workers. Maluleke also conceded that there were challenges with the recruitment drive for Census 2022, especially in remote areas, but Stats SA was able to circumvent that with targeted recruitment.

He also took the time to justify the colour green chosen for the census, saying it was not punting any particular political party.

“We have always maintained that we should not politicise the production of statistics. We have also seen almost every political party getting interested in our recruitment, almost wanting to dictate to us, even going as far as some councillors taking lists of potential candidates in their neighbourhoods — and we have refused to bow to that.”

Census 2022 kicked off on February 2.

“We are lucky in that we do not have the coronavirus fifth wave because we had gone on to different television and commercial and community radio stations to publicise online registration.

However, he said: “We didn’t have as much registration as we expected. Out of about 17.4m households, only about 455,000 registered. It shows us that not everyone who can read and write or has and can use a smartphone has an appetite to register online other than using their phone to make phone calls and receive messages.”

When the online registration did not take off, field workers had to be activated on February 14, he said.

“We announced that we would move our date of final collection to March 20, rather than February 28. We will have mop-up’s going on right up until March 20. This is in line with international best practice ...”

Stats SA’s ambition of collecting in one month was more of a reference period, he said, adding that unlike other countries, SA will not be extending the collection period beyond April.

“Covid-19 has thrown nations off-balance in terms of adhering to dates of collection, and we are no exception.”

He said the post-enumeration survey will begin on March 26.

“We take 1% and go back to compare record-for-record to be able to know how many people we have missed or counted more than once. We use the over or under count as a way of coming up with an estimate of what the national population is.”

He said SA was one of the few countries around the world that performed a post-enumeration survey and made the country’s undercount known to the public.

“Registration for remote data collection closed on February 21 and the uptake was not as much as we anticipated so we had to reopen to February 5. Only 25% of households who registered for computer-assisted web interviews have completed their questionnaires.”

The in-person interviews showed much better rate of completion.

“Now we monitor this hourly and we know where we are not doing well ... now we have more than 4-million completed. Computer-assisted telephonic interviews will run until March 20.”