PHILIPPE BERNES-LASSERRE, Johannesburg | Tuesday
SOUTH Africa will on Wednesday start its second post-apartheid census, a gigantic task to measure the changes in the living conditions of blacks, whites and coloureds over the past five years.
More than 80 000 enumerators — issued by Statistics South Africa with condom packs, “just in case” — will visit some 10_million households this month, with the results due to be made public in 18 months.
They will face problems.
“Traditionally in some parts of our country (censuses are) still viewed as an exercise of subjugation and insolence meant for slaves and livestock,” according to Lionel Mtshali, the head of the provincial executive in KwaZulu-Natal province in the east.
On white-owned farms, visitors are treated with suspicion.
In middle-class city suburbs, the houses are protected by barbed wire, electric fences, guard dogs, panic buttons and armed protection units.
And up to four million illegal immigrants will see the census as an exercise designed to smoke them out.
Statistician General Pali Lehohla is trying to placate them.
“We do not ask whether such a person has the necessary documentation to be in the country,” he said recently.
“We will not ask whether they are illegal or not.”
In the countryside, the enumerators may come across traditional chiefs who see them as agents of the nearby big towns — yet another attempt to undermine their authority.
The chiefs’ congress is asking the enumerators to present themselves to the chiefs and elders before going hut-to-hut.
Leaders of the country’s nine provinces all fear an under-count, because that would mean fewer government subsidies.
In Western Cape province, memories of the 1996 census are still fresh — its population count was revised downward between the preliminary and definitive results.
That census, two years after the end of apartheid, gave an overview of the abyss between the living standards of blacks, who make up 76,3% of the population, and whites (12,7%).
It showed that more than two-thirds of the blacks – 21-million — were living below the poverty threshold, defined at the time as R430 per month ($46 at current exchange rates). Eight percent of whites lived below the poverty threshold.
Whites earned 51,6% of the national wage, blacks 35%.
Those figures demonstrated the historic frontiers of a society divided along racial lines, commented then president Nelson Mandela.
The 1996 head-count census was a step up from the apartheid regime’s “approximate” censuses, but its organisers still encountered problems, “forgetting” three million people in rural areas.
They calculated the population at 40,58-million people, extrapolated to a 1999 estimation of 43,1-million.
The government and business leaders are all stressing the importance of the census in economic planning and both local and foreign investment projects in South Africa.
For the government of President Thabo Mbeki, the census will also be a key to calibrating its fight against poverty in terms of equipment and infrastructure, such as electrification and water reticulation in rural areas.
The results will also provide a base for campaigns in general elections expected to be held in 2004.
One gap: the true incidence of Aids in South Africa.
Questions will include the cause of death of relatives, but the disease remains a stigma, so few South Africans are considered likely to list it, even though the statistician general keeps repeating that the questionnaires will be confidential.
The government calculated that 4,7-million South Africans, or one in nine, were HIV-positive at the end of last year, and the country’s Medical Research Council estimates that Aids was responsible for a quarter of all deaths last year, and 40% of those who died between the ages of 15 and 49. – AFP