Keynotes Address by The Deputy Minister in the Presidency Nonceba Mhlauli on the Occasion of Celebrating the STATS SA Census 30th Anniversary in South Africa, Isibalo House, Pretoria
United Nations Resident Coordinator in South Africa, Mr Nelson Muffuh;
Heads of National Statistics Offices from the SADC region:
Mr Alex Shimuafeni, Statistician-General and CEO of the Namibia Statistics Agency; |
Mr Thembinkosi Shabalala, Director-General of the Central Statistics Office of Eswatini; and Mr Shelton Kanyanda, Director-General of the National Statistics Office of Malawi;
Representatives of Heads of National Statistics Offices from the SADC region:
Dr Lucky Mokgatlhe, Deputy Statistician-General of Statistics Botswana;
Mr Pelesana Moerane, Deputy Census Commissioner of the Lesotho Bureau of Statistics; and
Mr Aluwisio Mukavhi, Director: Demography and Social Statistics at ZimStat;
NFPA Representative for South Africa and Country Director for Botswana and Eswatini, Mr Yu Yu;
Dr Kefiloe Masiteng of the United Nations Resident Coordinator Office in South Africa;
Acting Director of the Monitoring and Evaluation Directorate at the African Peer Review Mechanism, Mr Jean-Yves Adou;
Chairperson of the South African Statistics Council, Dr Nompumelelo Mbele;
Deputy Chairperson of the South African Statistics Council, Mr Ian Assam, and members of the Council;
Former Statistician-General of South Africa, Dr Pali Lehohla;
Former Chairpersons of the South African Statistics Council, Mr Howard Gabriels and Dr Ben Mphahlele;
Former Deputy Director-General of Statistics South Africa, Dr Ros Hirzchowitz;
President of the South African Statistical Association, Prof Daniel Maposa;
Chief Executive Officer of the National Youth Development Agency, Mr Ndumiso Kubheka-Hadebe;
Representatives of the United Nations system and regional organisations, including UNFPA, UNICEF, UNHCR, IOM and WHO;
Representatives of the Bank of Tanzania and other partner institutions;
Members of civil society, the private sector and academia;
Members of the media;
Stats SA EXCO members and Provincial Heads;
Stats SA staff at Head Office and in the provinces;
Distinguished guests;
Ladies and gentlemen.
Good morning.
The Statistician-General has set the context for this celebration - thirty years of democratic census-taking, the milestones, and the vision for what comes next.
I want to focus on something that does not always make it into the headline statistics.
I want to talk about the people.
Because statistics, at their very best, are not numbers. They are people, counted. Which is why I love the message I saw on the poster that says, “30 years of counting All people because everyone counts” And the act of counting them requires other people - trained, motivated, determined, sometimes working in difficult conditions, sometimes walking roads that are not on any map - to go out and find them. That is the story I want to honour today.
The people behind the count: Statistics South Africa
Thirty years ago, Statistics South Africa did not exist as we know it today. In its place was the Central Statistical Service - an institution inherited from the apartheid era, fragmented and wholly unprepared for the ambition of an inclusive, democratic census.
Yet within a short period, dedicated public servants built such as yourselves - almost from nothing - the institutional and physical infrastructure needed for Census Night 1996.
They secured a building. They partitioned the space. They installed industrial scanners that operated around the clock, processing over a million images a day.
Enumerators were trained to reach townships and rural areas that had been deliberately excluded from previous censuses pre -democracy. They built trust in communities that had every reason to be suspicious of a government official appearing at the door with a clipboard.
That is the human story behind the statistics. And it has since been repeated, in various forms, in every census.
Census 2001: more than a million questionnaire pages processed across three shifts at two thousand processing stations.
Census 2011: a GIS revolution in mapping, millions of households enumerated using integrated digital geography for the first time.
Census 2022: conducted in the middle of a global pandemic, with fieldworkers adapting in real time to COVID protocols, and other community unrest. And still, 62 million South Africans were counted.
To every member of the Statistics South Africa team, past and present - your work is not just recognised today. It is fundamental to democracy in practice.
The data you produce enables the government to see where schools, clinics, and essential services are needed. Where resources must be redirected. Where progress is being made, and where it is not.
You make evidence-based planning not just possible, but credible. And credibility, in our constitutional democracy, is the precondition for everything.
To the Statistician-General and the executive leadership: thank you for upholding an institution whose independence is its greatest strength.
Statistical independence is not an administrative convenience. It is a constitutional safeguard. May it never be compromised.
The people who opened their doors
But Statistics South Africa cannot count a single person who does not open the door.
Every number in every census, every finding in every household survey, begins with an ordinary person who said yes.
Who let a fieldworker into their home. Who answered questions about how many people lived there, what work they did, whether they had access to water, whether their children were in school, and whether they had lost someone in the past year.
These are not abstract answers. They form the basis of the equitable share formula; the mechanism by which national revenue is distributed to every municipality in this country.
They guide decisions on where clinics are built, how many teachers are trained, where electricity grids are extended. By participating in the census, every household that opens its door invests in its community's future.
Not everyone realises this when the enumerator knocks. And that is one of our most significant ongoing challenges.
Across the world, census participation is becoming harder. People are busier and more mobile. A significant number of people live in gated estates, secure complexes, and high-rise buildings that are difficult to access. Some are anxious about privacy; about who will see their information and how it will be used.
Others are sceptical that responding will change anything in their lives. In some communities, legitimate frustration with service delivery turns into hostility towards any official who arrives at the door.
The lesson is clear: public trust must be earned continuously, not only in the census year. It requires transparency.
It requires communication in all our official languages, and through channels that people use. It requires partnership with traditional leaders, faith communities, councillors, residents' associations, and community development workers.
And - critically - it requires that after the census, we close the loop. We must show communities what was done with their information and how it enabled decisions.
To every person who has opened their door over the past thirty years - for a census, a General Household Survey, an Income and Expenditure Survey, or any instrument through which our country learns about itself - on behalf of government, I say thank you.
Your participation was an act of citizenship. It was more significant than you may have realised.
Our regional family: The SADC NSOS
I want to speak briefly to our colleagues from Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, and Zimbabwe.
You are here not as visitors at someone else's celebration. You are here as part of a regional statistical family whose shared challenges make our individual work stronger.
We are familiar with the challenges you navigate and know them intimately: counting mobile populations; reaching those without fixed addresses; conducting censuses under fiscal pressure; building public trust in data when institutional trust is fragile.
We do not have all the answers. But we are better placed to find them together than apart.
As the current chair of the SADC Statistics Council, South Africa does not seek to impose its methods on the region.
We seek to share experience, learn from what you have done, and build a regional statistical system that is genuinely greater than the sum of its parts.
I hope it was valuable, and I trust that the insights gained travel back with you to your governments as evidence of what solidarity can achieve.
Environmental change does not respect borders. Trade does not respect borders. Statistical cooperation must follow the same logic.
To all who use and champion, the data
To our partners in civil society - you are among the most consistent and demanding users of census data in this country.
You use it to advocate for communities whose needs are not reflected in official budgets at times. You use it to hold government accountable to its own plans and promises. That role cannot be undermined That role is legitimate. It is necessary. And it is valued. A statistical office that produces data only for the state is not serving the public. The data belongs to everyone.
To our partners in the private sector and research institutions: the census sampling frame underpins much of your own work. The reliability of your market analysis, your social research, your impact evaluations - all of it depends on the integrity of the count. Your scrutiny of our publications and your engagement with our methodologies strengthen the system which is why we continue to welcome such engagements.
To our colleagues from the United Nations, the African Union, and the wider development community: your technical partnership has been essential to the growth of South Africa's statistical capacity over the past thirty years.
We are grateful, and we look forward to deepening that exchange as we prepare for the 2030 round of censuses in our region.
The Census is an investment
Let me be candid about fiscal reality because it is the context in which all of us - and all our partners- are working.
The cost of counting every person - thoroughly, accurately, inclusively - is rising. We face this reality honestly. But I want to place a simple argument before this room: the census is not a cost. It is an investment.
Public money spent on a wrong population estimate is money spent in the wrong places. A well-funded census pays for itself many times over through better-targeted spending.
Under-investing in the census means errors that are expensive to correct, planning that is misaligned, and communities that are invisible to the very services meant to reach them.
And the solution to rising costs is not a smaller census - it is smarter collaboration. Shared platforms. Regional data standards. Pooled methodological investment. These are not luxuries. They are how we ensure that every country in this region can count all its people in 2030, regardless of budget constraints and I can assure colleagues today that this is a point we make repeatedly at the National treasury.
Closing: The Next Thirty Years
Programme Director, thirty years is a milestone. But it is also the beginning of a conversation about what the next thirty must look like.
Census 2031 is already in development. South Africa will be more urbanised, more connected, and more complex than the country of 1996.
But the purpose will remain unchanged: to count everyone. To ensure that no person is invisible. To give government and citizens alike the tools to build a country that works for all.
That work belongs to everyone in this room - statisticians, field workers, policymakers, advocates, academics, journalists, regional partners, and international colleagues. Most importantly, it belongs to the millions of residents who will be asked to open their doors again in 2031.
As we celebrate 30 years of counting South Africa, we are also reminded that statistics are fundamental to a functioning democracy. As the country prepares for the next local government elections, the information produced through the census and other official statistics will continue to provide an important evidence base for understanding our communities and informing local planning, resource allocation, and service delivery.
Statistics do not tell citizens how to vote, nor should they; they provide an impartial picture of the society in which we live, enabling citizens, government, and other stakeholders to have a shared understanding of our country's needs and priorities. In this way, official statistics are not political; they are part of the democratic infrastructure that helps a country understand itself and plan for its future.
And when that enumerator comes - or when the invitation arrives to complete the census online - I ask each and every South African: open the door. Take part. Your answers are not merely data. They are your voice in the planning of your country's future.
Special thanks, finally, to the men and women of Statistics South Africa - whose names will not appear in headlines, but whose work shapes every plan, every budget allocation, and every service delivery decision that has improved life in this country over the past thirty years.
This is your day. Take ownership of it.
I thank you.
