Thank you, Chairperson. Inaccurate reporting not only damages the public confidence in the products of Statistics SA, but also affects the attitudes of those providing the information.
I want to turn to what is going to be important over the next three years or so in the life of Statistics SA, and that is the work to be done on Census 2011. It's the third census that South Africa can conduct since we earned democracy and the census has become the basis of our national statistics system.
It is, in fact, the biggest peacetime mobilisation of the population. In October next year, 120 000 people will be put in the field to canvass information from 13 million dwellings. They will be asking residents of the households for information about their age, gender, level of education, employment, language, access to services and a range of other things.
In our previous censuses there were a number of lessons we learnt and what was discussed last week in the committee was that we were concerned about the undercount of 10% in 1996, and 17% in 2001. Now, what puts me at war with the Statistician-General and his team is a call I would like to make, and I hope it will be supported by this committee, and that is that we should tolerate no more than a 2% undercount in 2011. It's a tough call, but a necessary one and it's a tough call partly because people don't want to provide the information. So many people have reasons not to provide the information.
One of the issues that presents us with the problem is that too many South Africans live in gated communities and enumerators can't get in. Another problem that we encounter is that there are people who receive services in different parts of the country. They have RDP houses in one part, they live in another part and they don't want the government to know where they are.
There are people who are in the country illegally and want to live twilight lives. There are families on farms that have been displaced by farmers and they've now been replaced with illegal workers. You can't get onto these farms to measure and all of these things add up to this undercount problem. When we ask of Parliament to take these issues seriously, it's because we need to know how many South Africans there are and what our quality of life is.
In areas where services are needed, all of this is not a party - political function, it's a governmental function and I truly believe that Parliament should play a greater role in overseeing that we can actually crack through what we know now.
Let me end by saying that our flight plan is, of course, that which we can measure as improvements in the quality of lives of people. We should agree that whilst significant progress has been made, we are not approaching our destination nearly fast enough and that the fuel for this journey - financial resources and a competent Public Service-are not being efficiently used. Our instrument gauge in the cockpit must tell us all of these things.
Statistics SA runs the avionics to calibrate the gauges on the instrument panel. If we want improvement, we must read those gauges and know that their reliability is never in question. This is hard work, mostly behind- the-scenes work and always thankless work.
I want to deviate from this last point by expressing our appreciation to the Statistician-General, Mr Pali Lehohla, and his competent team who need the confidence of this Parliament to do what they must do. I also want to thank the SA Statistics Council, led so ably and diligently by Mr Howard Gabriels.
I then wish to thank members of the Portfolio Committee on Finance for the many hours of oversight and engagement which Statistics SA will have from you.
We have only just began to live together in this area. I could sing the song if you wanted me to, Chair! An enhanced collaboration and a keener oversight will deliver a better quality of democracy. I thank you. [Applause.]