Africa’s time can only be realised through Africans. As the world faces a crisis, I am reminded of an address I delivered as chair at the 11th African Symposium on Statistical Development (ASSD) in Gabon in 2015. Here is an edited version, as relevant today as it was then.
Mbolo! Wé ma sorah! I greet you as we gather today in Libreville, Gabon. Gabon, the land of many contradictions, owes its name to the estuary of the Komo River. This is a country that has witnessed slavery and imperial powers that sought to pit one ethnic group against the other. Ethnicity was used to entrench a negative connotation of identity. Thus would rise freedom in the name of the capital city, Libreville. Libreville, the place of freedom. The place Lawrence of Arabia would parallel when he mourned the death of Selim Ahmed, as captured in the preamble to his book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: “I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars. To earn you freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for me.”
In science Gabon stakes her claim. The natural nuclear reactors discovered in 1972 in the Franceville basin of Oklo and Bangombé existed about two-billion years before humans learnt to harness uranium. These reactors have puzzled scientists because water was able to percolate through sandstone rich in uranium deposits. They could also regulate themselves by switching on and off regularly for thousands of years. As such, they would have behaved like geysers, with water heating up and gushing out at regular intervals. This would imply the reactors were stable. The question for those of us who deal with measurement on the African continent is this: what type of stability do we need and what vehicles will help us achieve it? We measure so we know how to differentiate across space, time and performance levels. We also know and understand the environment in which we handle our toil.
As an African child growing up in Lesotho, herding cattle, spanning oxen and planting seasonal crops such as maize, sorghum and wheat, then at harvest time mowing the wheat while women ululated and bundled the harvest, watching the elderly thresh sorghum in song and enjoy the brew, and seeing children indulging in sour porridge taught me about production to consumption. It would be my father, a teacher, who would inspire us as he woke us at ungodly hours to contribute our share in this production value chain before we went to school. Quoting from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, he would implore us: “The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upwards in the night.”
We toiled upwards in the night and in November 2005 gathered in Yaoundé, Cameroon, to lament the continental decline of statistical development at the hands of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA). In 2006, we met in Cape Town to inaugurate the African Symposium on Statistical Development (ASSD) to counter this decline. We rallied as countries and invested so much in resources that at the height of our success we even managed to get three pan-African institutions, the African Union Commission (AUC), ECA and African Development Bank (AfDB), to work together. We planned and penned each step to commit Africa to the 2010 Round of Censuses. We left no stone unturned and allowed nothing to stand in the way of achieving our goals. As Africans we heeded the call to silence guns on the continent and shared our experiences as countries emerging from political conflict. In Kigali we met as Rwanda, South Africa, Mozambique and Sudan, going further afield and inviting Cambodia and Afghanistan to share experiences of data collection in conflict and what censuses — hard facts — do to inspire nation building. We used this experience to work with Angola, Cote d’Ivoire, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), among others, to implement our 2006 ASSD inaugural decision to ensure in-conflict and out-of-conflict countries, including fragile states, used statistics to carve roads to evidence-based peace settlements. In doing so, the 2010 Round of Censuses delivered tidings to Africa as more than 48 countries undertook population censuses, largely using their own resources. We also inspired collaboration and cooperation, including sharing of resources, adopting new technologies and delivering better results faster and more cheaply. Cape Verde, Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire are pioneers in using electronic devices. They have been followed by many who now use them to collect survey information. No doubt, the 2020 round will see a digital census as countries such as Namibia, Zambia, South Africa and many others latch on to this technology.
Africa has reached great heights in addressing the thirst for measurement. It has demonstrated with distinction that it can manage its affairs and remedy failure. But again Africa is under serious threat, one that is self-inflicted. It has to be cured by Africans.
Buoyed by the heights reached, as if inspired by the Franceville basin reactors to seek stability in our operations, the ASSD prioritised civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) when we convened in Cairo. To date, African ministers convene annually to advance the mission to eliminate invisibility. We are reaching great heights, not by sudden flight but toil upwards in the night while our companions sleep. Today, 10 years on, we are becoming a shadow of what we were. The state of affairs now is less accidental than man-made. We therefore cannot allow ourselves to suffer the same crisis again. We cannot tolerate that for three years the ECA has failed to appoint a director of statistics. Instead, our pride is imploding, impacting negatively on the hard-won victories of ensuring Pan African statistics units work together. This puts our 2020 Round of Censuses at immeasurable risk, the CRVS system is in intensive care, national accounts are becoming big talk and the heights reached by Africa are likely to suffer due to leadership failures at coordination level. This is intolerable and we shall resolve at this 11th ASSD to deal with the matter. We cannot allow failure and its pain to revisit us.
This failure occurs against greater sustainable development goal (SDG) challenges, where African statisticians have again been gallant in their input on the common African position and focused on strategy-based costing of SDG measurement. Inspired by what African statisticians submitted to their heads of state in Sandton, South Africa, in June this year — a strategy-based SDG costing measurement — AU heads of government asked African statisticians to compile Agenda 2063 indicators and cost measurements, particularly for the first 10 years. We are on this task and guided by the importance and urgency thereof. But the paucity and slumber of ECA leadership while we toil upwards in the night has immense consequences for what we should achieve.
Even greater danger is posed by the so-called Global Partnership for Data, which was hurriedly constructed on the margins of the UN General Assembly this year. This construct has dire consequences for Africa as technology, money and facilitators, to the exclusion of statisticians, conspired to rush its formation. Unfortunately, the genesis of this formation started in Africa and took root on the margins of the Addis Financing For Development (FFD) Summit in June. Statisticians and African statisticians were excluded from it because money, technology and facilitators presided over the fate of data and statistics. These are the challenges of our times and toil. Others are great at sleeping while we toil upwards in the night, and they are great at waiting to capture our heights and keep them. It is not new, that is what colonialism did and this is what coloniality it does. Politico-economic mechanisms wait for great heights to be reached, then ambush us and snatch these in front of our very eyes. In doing so, they endanger SDGs and Agenda 2063.
Thus, the challenge of the 11th ASSD is to ensure the SDG project and Agenda 2063 are not hijacked by technology, money and facilitators. Neither should official statisticians deny the world transformative change that has to happen in measurement. If I may advance a solution in this murky world of money markets, technology, facilitators and statistics: Africa resolves that the formation of the Global Partnership for Data be annulled and the much-punted World Forum for Data be held in the third quarter of 2016, with a true Global Partnership for Data formed under the supervision of the UN secretary-general. This is the new task of the ASSD and should be shared with AU heads of state and communicated as an Africa position. We shall provide the necessary resolutions should Africans agree.
Africa has reached great heights in addressing the thirst for measurement. It has demonstrated with distinction that it can manage its affairs and remedy failure. But again Africa is under serious threat, one that is self-inflicted. It has to be cured by Africans. Africa cannot afford to reach great heights only to fail to stay there, for that will see Africa revisited by sophisticated, cancerous colonialism. Africa should reach great heights and stay there. That is what sustainable development demands of us.
Seven years later, in 2022, that is still what is demanded of us, even more so.
Dr Pali Lehohla is the director of the Economic Modelling Academy, a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Johannesburg’s Wits university and a distinguished alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa.
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