Should the Statistician-General step down, or the science of statistics step down? Amplifying Pali Lehohla

 Despite the underlying desire to control narrative formation, manipulation, and characterisation, as well as imposing its hegemony on the GNU, the call for the SG to step down by the DA is a flawed proposition. It's unclear whether the SG himself or the science his team of statisticians uphold is under scrutiny. While it's true that science doesn't correct itself, scientists do so through rigorous validation methods. Therefore, the call for the SG to step down, a product of the subjective nature of politics, cannot be trusted. It further erodes the trust in science the political world has gotten used to. 

The brute truth is that a body of established facts, in this case, census information, constitutes scientific knowledge. This means science will always have insiders and outsiders, a reason enough to build bridges and reduce the resultant rift. Politics and facts deniers have laid siege to science. Calls for the outcome of a scientific process such as a national census to be subjected to the whims of politics require the defence of knowledge and the candour of science and scientists. The risks of being unable to discern between knowledge and opinion are ever-present in a world where interests drive the disrespect for evidence.  

Often, when those in the vocation of politics have run out of runways to continue denying the outcomes of science, they resort to doing more of what they know. They are quick to construct parameters of thinking that become prisons they lock themselves in; in this case, playing the person or perceived system represented and not the science is the known known in the vocation of politics.

With political interests and various biases as the core currency of politics, the attack on the SG's office and his person culminates the inherent bias that has characterized 'the dominant' within the opposition complex. This bias threatens the unity of science as a nonpartisan, non-racial, and non-sexist phenomenon, making it all the more important to defend it. 

Therefore, society must interrogate the assumptions and exposures that underpin the overtly subjective call for the SG to step down. The often-consensual conclusions of scientists or statisticians in the SG office should make us, the public, wary of non-statistical scientists or commissioned statistical scientists behind the call for the SG to step down movement who step outside their expertise. 

In one of his many renditions of the power and force of numbers, Pali Lehohla argues that numbers have no relationship with the interests of those interpreting them but have an unquestionable loyalty to their origins and computations. Therefore, the evolution of truths, which forms the nature of science, is anchored through numbers. Suppose the force of statistical methods employed or adopted by StatsSA, most of which are development-oriented, are leading to the demise of false narratives about RSA and its development. In that case, the sceptics should not drag the nation along in manufacturing a void-of-numbers narrative. The consensus of our statisticians led by the SG is, until proven by equivalent or better science, if any, to be otherwise the safest standing proxy for the truth it is conveying. It would, therefore, be responsible for those making public policy decisions about South Africa to rely on the numbers the StatsSA has produced. 

It is the nature of science and its experts to continually interrogate conclusions and consensuses. However, with the growing capacity to sponsor scientists toward predetermined findings, we must be wary of decisions and calls driven by our social, political, economic, and cultural biases or contexts. This becomes worse when we become accountable to the values we hold without necessarily even being aware of them; our values saturate us as a society. In this context, the call for the SG to step down is unwarranted and should not be entertained.