I tell the story many a time when I am faced with choices of having to mourn. Mourning is a collective action of expressing pain. It can be amongst people or about an individual. The effect of mourning is that it takes on total immersion of the body and soul. The body gets exhausted as all its parts cave in to give recognition to the one whom, in breathing flesh, cannot be communed with. Collectively, it arouses moments of collapse and fainting in very spectacular form.
To say that US President Donald Trump’s signing of executive orders has brought about global mourning is to put it mildly. Economically, the demise of livelihoods is not on the horizon, but in households, driving generational harm in terms of deaths deprived of immediate medication.
Economically, the demise of livelihoods is not on the horizon but in households, driving generational harm. In institutions that delivered services to peoples, only narcissistic beings cannot be moved by the scale of disaster at those levels where people depended on the health services the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) delivered. The sudden closure has been, “You are Fired,” reflecting the man himself in his heyday’s reality Apprentice show. His skills of firing workers, is not only being aimed at Americans, but for the globe.
In 1998, we worked on a painstaking process of knowing who was fired by God from earth, not only that they were fired, but about how they departed.This was the beginning of ensuring that the cause of death statistics is systematically captured so that, by knowing what killed the dead, the living can be saved. By 1999, this effort was put into practice. The advantage of having a medical doctor who was also a minister of health made this process easier.
The joint effort from Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) and Department of Health, therefore, paid off and we could get the Department of Home Affairs to adapt its forms to capture cause of death better, allowing notification of births and deaths by institution of occurrence, which is predominantly in centres of health-care and not at home affairs. Therefore, locating the innovation at point of occurrence was no brainer.
As life is life, my cousin passed on in Cape Town in 2001 shortly after I was appointed as Statistician-General of South Africa. Upon arriving at Crossroads clinic, I exchanged pleasantries with the doctor who then took me through the necessary formalities regarding the demise of my cousin. I then asked for the documentation, which he gladly shared.
Upon reading the document as the chief mourner, I found that not only was the cause of death not stated, but it was feebly referred to as bizarre. Having gone front to back on the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD10) system, I had not come across a cause of death called bizarre. So, I asked the good doctor why the last page is not filled in. His reply was, “It is not important; it is for statistics.”
I was mourning the death of my cousin and wondered whether I could carry a double mourning of the death of statistics. In the circumstances I decided to mourn the death of my cousin and not of statistics: not because I did not care about a subject of my immersion, but because I needed a more educative entry into the subject. I reported back to the organisation, repeatedly for that matter, where I was faced with a difficulty of mourning the death of my cousin and that of statistics.
Then Dr Tuoane, who headed the causes of death division at StatsSA, came with an institutional solution of turning doctors into cause of death reporting advocates. A course for doctors was arranged, and the medics began a programme on cause of death very much to their delight, despite my heavy scepticism towards them after I was subjected to a difficult choice of mourning statistics or the demise of my cousin.
Why is cause of death demise a platform for learning in the context of Trump and his axing of USAID? The USAID took on many personae, with Trump exposing its hidden purposes (like spying), surprising those who saw it only as a do-gooder agency, of which the naïve did not know all along.
While Trump is a man of several trump cards and gaffes, such as a “small country none on the globe knows much about [Lesotho]”, the USAID as a source of soft power for America’s hegemony cannot be doubted. Soft power comes with collation of data. The USAID was the prime driver of Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) the world over.
With the demise of the DHS, has the DHS also been subjected to death, and its cause of death, of course, will go down in the adjusted ICD10 manual as Donald Trump? That much said, the death of DHS heralds many other causes that will breed new underlying causes of death on poverty statistics and the whole edifice of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) indicators, where poverty measures are the most ubiquitous.
Guess what their source is: it is the DHS data that Trump has killed. The executive order that killed the DHS undermines, not only the DHS itself, but the United Nations (UN) Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics, which were adopted as universal law by the United Nations General Assembly. On that day when these principles were adopted, the UN Statistical Commission requested me to address their adoption for report back to the UN General Assembly as global statistical law.
I was pleased to share how the UN family embraced their long-lost polecat pariah, apartheid South Africa, which, in 20 years of its admission to the UN family of nations, through the support of the UN and many a member country, made me proud that South Africa committed to building help for other countries whose statistics systems were in dire straits.
With the UN’ support, we were able to lift our heads with pride, as the Statistician-General of South Africa took a leading role on the global stage. This moment carried deep significance, rooted in the UN’s Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics. The late Katherine Wallman, the distinguished former Chief Statistician of the United States, played a pivotal role in shaping this noble framework - a testament to statisticians as peace brokers of the world. Statistics, after all, serves as a conduit for peace and a guardian of global truth. Without a clear understanding of poverty- particularly multidimensional poverty - how can the world accurately measure and address the plight of the poor? This is a pressing issue that the UN Statistical Commission must prioritise on its agenda, and one that all sub-regional bodies should urgently tackle if the Sustainable Development Goals are to be truly data-driven and evidence-based.
The story would be incomplete without a perspective from the north of the US, courtesy of Ivan Fellegi, Canada’s longest-serving Chief Statistician. In a poignant message of grief to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Fellegi wrote:
“Some 20 years ago, I attended the Conference of European Statisticians. The Soviet bloc had just collapsed, and we were all gripped by an urgent need to assist the so-called ‘transition countries’ in adopting the standards and values of developed democratic nations. Someone proposed codifying the long-held basic values we all shared. I recall my initial reaction: Canada certainly didn’t need them.
"More broadly, I felt it was a shame to have to spell out basic truths in black and white, regardless of the country. But I recognised that these ‘transition countries’ hadn’t yet had time to cultivate the widely accepted values that, in developed nations, had underpinned official statistics for decades. So, I supported the idea and even helped draft the text. The result, once adopted by the United Nations, became known as the Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics. Little did I imagine that, 20 years later, I’d be citing them as principles Canada must recommit itself to,” Fellegi said.
We now confront a painful dilemma: grieving the demise of DHS while also mourning the loss of countless lives that will perish due to the absence of DHS data to inform critical decisions. Rest in peace.
Dr Pali Lehohla is 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.
*** The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Independent Media or IOL.
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