Municipalities don’t have the skills to interpret statistics from the census to help improve service delivery, says Trevor Manuel.
|||Cape Town - Municipalities don’t have the proper skills to interpret statistics from the census to help improve service delivery and planning, says Minister in the Presidency for Planning Trevor Manuel.
He and statistician-general Pali Lehohla were speaking on Monday at a symposium at Stellenbosch University on the government’s use of data in planning.
They both agreed there was a serious shortage of skills at municipalities to process information released by Statistics SA (Stats SA).
“We have an enormous difficulty with municipalities in the main… and I have asked Stats SA to take data to the municipalities and systematically go through it (with them),” Manuel said.
The problem was policymakers didn’t always understand how to interpret data and used consultants to write their integrated development plans (IDPs).
“Yet these consultants use the Stats SA data… People outsource their brains,” Manuel said. “I hope public representatives realise how easy it is to understand statistics. I’m not judgmental of local municipalities, but we must ensure that data is used for decision-making. It’s fairly basic stuff.”
Manuel said he worried that a lot of analysis was done without proper data.
It was important for Stats SA to present its findings in a way that was understood by everyone, he said.
Lehohla agreed companies and consultancies were making money in contracts from local government to produce reports that used data released by the government itself.
“There are situations where you find a lot of cut-and-paste stuff in IDPs. There would be municipalities in the Western Cape who use a consultant and then municipalities in Limpopo also use them, then suddenly something pops up from the Western Cape in the Limpopo report,” he said.
He said this group of companies packaged statistics better than Stats SA did. “Stats SA needs to up its act so that data is understood.”
Lehohla said many municipal managers didn’t use information available to them. Municipalities in KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape did make use of statistics in their IDP reports.
cobus.coetzee@inl.co.za
Cape Times