PALI LEHOHLA | The scandal of invisibility and futures we can’t see

Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University has made important remarks on Africa. While he has been doing so in the light of the rise of Trump, his views on Africa 2100 suggest that Africa has to develop tools of foresight that span 100 years.

Of course, if Africans suffer the lowest life expectancy, why bother about a life in which when you are in leadership and you are above 60, your concern is more about the grave in two years and not about intergenerational value?

Though Africa decided on Agenda 2063, notably under Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, not much work has been done to build tools of foresight that future-proof the Africa we desire. Such tools deployed well could say to us by 2063, we as Africans have foolproofed that which we desired in 2014 when we launched Agenda 2063. You can go to any entity African, there are no tools of foresight that are anchored in modelling and hard figures that would guarantee in the first instance foolproof of our intentions.

Sadly, even with efforts of future-proofing through introduction of data systems that would enable such to happen, Africans are notorious for scoring own goals and or handing over their agenda to others. Spurred largely by the paucity of data, especially of population, the then chief director at Stats SA who represented me at a meeting in Mali brought feedback home in 2004. The feedback made me worry about the state of statistics on the continent.

In 2005, in a meeting in New York on the 2010 Round of Housing and Population Census, our own United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (Uneca) said it had no agenda for the round. I could not conceal my frustration at my pan-African institution. Dr Grace Bediako, who was head of Statistics Ghana, and I were in attendance and this statement cut deep as we shared notes. It was not untrue that there was no plan, but it was a truth that hurt.

I came back and compared notes with Risenga Maluleke, the current statistician-general, on this matter. To the credit of Stats SA, we had already started working within Sadc in 1998 on harmonisation of censuses, and with Richard Leete of the then United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) based in New York, I had arranged a Global South summit on statistics where notably we had Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan — countries I had gone on mission to advise on censuses in the late 1990s — and Afghanistan among the non-African countries participating in our summit in 2003. Certainly, a movement of discontent was brewing to address inaction. South Africa appeared to be part of the leadership pact to tackle the paucity of data. In 2005 November we met in Yaoundé where African statisticians decided to have a unilateral declaration of independence from Uneca and throw their lot in for a possible new formation and Afristat could have been a candidate.

In the dying minutes of our meeting the fate of Uneca was sealed and the UDI was on the cards. I requested the Africans at Uneca to let me talk to the South African government to open discussions with Uneca and that we should commit to meeting in South Africa in 60 days to resolve the matter.

When I presented what I discussed in Yaoundé, Cameroon, then-minister of finance Trevor Manuel called the incoming executive secretary to Uneca and told her to be in South Africa on January 30 2006 to potentially avert a UDI by African statisticians. Abdoulie Janneh came and the two guided the birth of the Africa Symposium for Statistical Development and actively supported it during their respective tenure of six and eight years in their portfolios.

The rewards were significant and the 2010 Round of Housing and Population Census was important, with 50 countries in Africa undertaking a census of the population. Then it really felt good to be an African,

Propelled by this success in 2012 we embarked on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics, and given that Dr Nkosazana Zuma was scheduled to head the AU Commission, we inaugurated the Africa Programme for Accelerated Improvement of Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (APAI-CRVS) on the eve of her assignment to Addis Ababa. But today both these programmes have become a sad shadow of themselves. The value we created, especially on the APAI-CRVS, has been snatched before our eyes and can undermine what Sachs pointed out in his recent talk — that Africa could be the giant by 2100 and can grow in the 20 years ahead.

The most crucial documentation in state systems is the Civil Registration and Vital Statistics system. My first research document in state systems focused on how personal identity is procured. In Bophuthatswana, where I was a professional officer in the early 1980s and later director in 1990 in the statistics office, I had the privilege of investigating how civil registration occurred and how it was implemented. In 1983 I mounted a survey inquiring into whether vital events are recorded, and the results and reasons for these not being handled were horrifying.

My task in South Africa in addressing the scandal of invisibility started first with ensuring that communities are visible. I ensured that communities were visible in the 1985 Population Census of Bophuthatswana. Ridiculous as this may seem, censuses in South Africa only elaborated place names for suburbs, urban areas, and in the case of rural areas, farms where whites settled. The African communities in rural and traditional areas or squatter settlements had no means for their community to be identified by place name. This constituted my second struggle with identity as a driver of development. So in 1985 I conducted a census that had place names as a central feature for addressing development. That was the benchmark for subsequent censuses that I conducted to date in South Africa.

Having succeeded in Bophuthatswana to understand problems associated with civil registration, I was able to take on legislative reforms post apartheid and in the main argue for what my survey of 1983 had shown, that most births occur in public institutions. The important move was then for births to be notified in these institutions. The law was amended to allow for this in 1998 and registration of births improved. Vital registration in South Africa has a coverage of 90% for births and 95% for deaths. And this is because of the initial investment in the changes in law in 1998. Home affairs in subsequent years mounted campaigns for registration including mobile clinics for doing so. Public policy on child support grants and school feeding schemes ensured that events are registered on time and the law moved to an enforceable 30 days.

The key for development therefore is based on the drive for unique identifiers across space and time. And human beings, as agents of development, are crucial as subjects, objects and prime movers of identification and identity systems for development.

As the then chair of the African Symposium for Statistical Development since 2006, I have been engrossed in among others Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS).  Thus, after ensuring Africa counts in the 2010 Round of Censuses, I led a crusade that led to the ministerial conference on CRVS as a standing commitment to ensure that human identity as a source of citizenship and participation becomes an agenda central to development. I refer to these as the ‘know-me’ systems. Armed with such systems social, economic, environmental and political interactions are enabled and the obstacles and pain of implementing development imperatives is removed.

As a statistician engrossed in standards and working nationally, continentally and globally, and now retired, I bring with me enormous wealth of knowledge, having been one of the 25 person team advising the UN secretary-general on data revolution, which is a central piece of ID systems. I have engaged in the discourse of who owns technology and the associated data. Thus I have brought to the fore the question of what the levers of development would be in an information society, including its central thesis of its political economy.

The APAI-CRVS movement is a sad shadow of itself. Into this space ID4Africa and ID4D have snatched the agenda and taken centre stage while Africans slumber. The question of data sovereignty is one that Africans have to answer if they have to live up to Sachs's dream for Africa. Ebrahim Traore of Burkina Faso and his counterparts in Mali and Niger have shown Africa how to bell the cat and the geopolitics provide the wind behind Africa’s sail. Africa should catch the sail on the high wave and not procrastinate, otherwise Agenda 2063 and Sachs’s rendition of 2100 will be but more of the same for Africans.

Dr Pali Lehohla is a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, and a distinguished alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa