Lehohla’s yellow jacket is coming back

Lehohla’s yellow jacket is coming back

Sello Morake

Former Statistician General of South Africa, Dr. Pali Lehohla said his famous yellow jacket was coming back, this week.

Lehohla, who has just retired as the Statistician General of South Africa in an exclusive interview with this newspaper, said he was busier as his work was more in demand. In a wide ranging interview in Moroka location, Lehohla said politicians understood the statistics but choose not to act while in government. He said he was still young to retire and that there was a lot of work which he was supposed to do.

“Naturally yes, I miss my office but two years earlier had been working outside the office from 2015 so that I couldn’t miss it a lot. I had let the juniors to take over. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) had put a bloat on my career because we had exaggerated a lot but we later corrected it. The South African consumer price index (CPI) is one of the best in the world,” said Lehohla.

He said policy issues were difficult to implement and that politicians tended to ignore the statistics when elections were close. Lehohla said statistics were about evidence and politics were about issues. He said technocrats should no fear politicians but must speak truth to power.

He said he had fond memories about his former department in which he played a big role with his colleagues to make statistics more user-friendly and fashionable to an ordinary person in the street. Lehohla even some tertiary lecturers had had difficulty in understanding his reports and what was needed to be done.

“It is very important to know and understand the context of the statistics. We are a broken society and it is good that the Motsepe Foundation is focusing on the churches and schools so that they could be healed. It is through spiritual healing that these things could be addressed. You need resources and the Motsepe foundation is doing that,” he said.

He said his responsibility was to start a Pan-African Institute for evidence because he realized that people were not grasping the importance of statistics and how the statistics was important in making decisions for the future. Lehohla said Africans were not looking at hard data but it was good to dream about having a single currency and that the politicians should look at the statistics on trade so that they can make informed decisions.

He said that politicians had to change the way they do things for the betterment of the Africans. Lehohla said Statisticians had to be taught about urban and rural planning and that he was proud that 70 Statisticians have acquired doctoral Degrees since he held fort at the Statistics department.