Dr Pali Lehohla
Africa’s Mission Challenges: an address I delivered at the UN Economic Commission for Africa to the joint Conference of StatCom Africa, Civil Registration and Vital Statistics and the UN Committee of Experts on the Global Geospatial Information Management on Tuesday, October 25. * This is an edited version.
Africa faces mission challenges of energy hunger, food hunger and self-insufficiency, development deficits on almost all terrains of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, not least because of the more recent Russian-Ukraine war, not least because of the Covid-19 shocks, not least because of the recent data revolution, not least from historical challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
But mission challenges embedded in colonialism and its adaptation through neo-colonialism and coloniality machinations that often express themselves independent of our will and ride on statistics, technology, money and facilitators.
To confront these mission challenges we decided not to be like an individual machine that retains a dwarf-like character, especially in the face of impending data revolution.
We established Fasdev, StatCom Africa and several strategic pathways such as the African Symposium for Statistical Development (ASSD).
On this path, we also understood the story of life and embedded succession of this relay by creating Young African Statisticians as a strategic force for renewal and adaptation to digital technology to combat the severe deficits inherent in those born before technology, but now akin to dinosaurs.
Yet we remain vulnerable to vagaries of development, especially in the context of the dark side represented by the tyranny of technology, money, data and statistics. A critical feature of these mission challenges is how the African system collaborates in confronting it.
To this end, we need to take heed from philosopher Karl Marx as he elaborates on technology. He warns us in Capital Vol. I, chapter 15, against being a machine that retains a dwarf like character.
In a society with data, the true character of statistics must comply with the cognitive map on all its terrains, especially of data and statistics, not only as public good, but its underlying architecture to truly be public as it integrates with its organic element of technology and geography.
Yet the thirst for monetisation turns data into new oil, creating the destructive competition amongst machines that retain dwarf like characters in Africa by weaponisation of this non-rival product -data, thus successfully creating artificial scarcity through this barrier of dwarf like characters.
These are the challenges of our times and these are the challenges of our toil.
As regards Civil Registration and Vital Statistics, the danger has occurred. The careful architecture that we designed of Home Affairs institutions and national statistics institutions has been smashed and broken. The kernel has been snatched and the statistics community is left with an impoverished shell.
We should dig deep and realise that we have been turned into that machine that retains a dwarf-like character. Institutions that have no statutory mandate have come in between the organic chemistry of our home affairs and statistics institutions of ushering new data, statistics and technology as a force for good.
Let us be reminded that by 2050, every third person in the world will be African and every second youth will be African. The kernel is what is crucial.
It has been snatched and Africans will be a meal for, managed by and through neo-colonialism and coloniality.
The civil registration and vital statistics agenda should be restored to how its warrior and architect Professor Ben Kiryegera, the founding director of African Centre for Statistics at the Economic Commission for Africa, skilfully designed it.
In this regard we need to put a mirror to ourselves as the countries, the Economic Commission for Africa, the African Development Bank and the AU to check whether we have not presided over this machine that retains a dwarf like character.
I urge fellow statisticians to go back to the 11th ASSD Resolutions in Gabon for therein we elevated what is in new language becoming data stewardship, which recognises the interconnectedness and importance of technology, data, statistics, democracy, development in order to march towards the SDGs and Agenda 2063.
These in the main rests on the statisticians as technocratic development catalysts. The stakes are too high and the heights we reached we should keep.
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 Wits and a distinguished alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa
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