Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics
WHOA! Hold your horses! Lovers of polemics, rhetoric, semantics and debates have gone to town testing their punditry over the latest jobs statistics, declaring that unemployment figures from the 2008 Namibia Labour Force Survey (LFS) were wrong.
The 2008 LFS conducted by the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare put unemployment in Namibia at 51.2 percent. The 2012 survey conducted by the Namibia Statistical Agency (NSA) of the National Planning Commission declared this week that contrary to 2008 only 27.4 percent of Namibians were unemployed.
The latest information has some celebrating that they were right to declare the labour ministry’s survey flawed and that people like Prime Minister Hage Geingob and economist Martin Mwinga have been vindicated. Geingob shouted “lies, damned lies and statistics” when the 2008 LFS figures were released in 2010 even after the government kept them covered up while trying, but subsequently failing, to sanitise the information. Mwinga pored through the 2008 LFS survey and declared that it had missed crucial areas such as subsistence farming, and thus he put unemployment at 28 percent.
The NSA appears to have heeded those arguments and adjusted the research methodology accordingly. But John Steytler, the Statistician General and head of the NSA, was quick to caution anyone who might celebrate the ‘reduction’ in unemployment figures of four years ago from 51 percent to 27 percent that they “shouldn’t read too much” into the new numbers.
The public should not attribute the “movements in labour force indicators from previous periods to specific policy interventions during the review period”, said Steytler. In short, the jobless situation in Namibia has not changed for the better.
The only thing that appears to have improved is the method and speed with which the NSA goes about the work of providing the country with timely information. And for that they must get both material and political support from the government to do even better. Without information backed up by reliable statistics, planning to improve the lot of our people will be poor.
We trust the days are gone when important information and statistics took years to become public, by which time they had expired and were useless. Vital information such as joblessness should be available more regularly, preferably monthly, if we regard employment as an unavoidable indicator of our growth and well-being.
The latest job figures are not only deflating because more than 50 percent of the youth (between 20 and 35 years) remain unemployed. But by other indicators life is tough for most Namibians. Among the 630,000 considered employed, a massive number of 27.8 percent earn zero to N$1,000 a month, while 39.2 percent get between N$1,000 and N$3,999. Slightly more than 12 percent make between N$4,000 and N$6,999, 18.5 percent are in the N$7,000 to N$9,999 bracket and only two percent manage to get more than N$10,000. That is probably before taking into account that not only is the income low in this country of a high cost of goods and services, but Namibia has a large number of dependants compared to each gainfully employed person (total population 2.1 million).
We may shout “lies, damned lies and statistics” to discredit the NSA’s diligent research or use it to buttress arguments that the situation is not as bad as opponents in the discussions want us to believe.
Yet, in the midst of the debates, polemics, rhetoric and semantics, put a face of despair to the statistics showing that among the employed Namibians, six percent are actually unpaid family members and 15.8 percent are subsistence farmers who this year and next year might have no crops or livestock to live off.
Gone, imagine, are the days when every Namibian who had gone to college, or every standard eight and 10 graduate, was guaranteed a respectable white-collar job. The situation is undoubtedly worse than what the numbers point to. The job figures hardly call for celebration, rather for a speedy attempt to find solutions.