StatsSA chief’s threats to staff
Johannesburg - The fallout over census undercounting is getting vicious, with Statistician-general Pali Lehohla threatening to “physically manhandle” retired deputy director-general and whistle-blower Dr Jairo Arrow.
Lehohla made the comments to senior Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) staff at an address commemorating Youth Day last month.
“I told Jairo when we left the minister’s (Minister in the Presidency Trevor Manuel) meeting… in that meeting that lasted three minutes in my office with exco, I said, ‘Jairo, when this is done I’m coming for you, I’m coming for you’,” Lehohla is understood to have told staff.
“In fact, I wanted to come for him at that moment, even to physically manhandle him. It was that close. It was that close.”
This week, Lehohla told The Sunday Independent that he was “joking” about manhandling Arrow, but he was “not joking about how irritated” he was about the incident.
“Tyranny will always come in administrations and politics and people are left with with little opportunity to express their frustrations. But this whistle-blowing is motivated by self-interest and is aimed at destroying me and this organisation,” he said in an interview at StatsSA’s offices in Pretoria.
“I’ve seen many people hurt and destroyed by people with an agenda disguised as whistle-blowing.”
Arrow and senior StatsSA’s chief director for methodology, evaluation and standards, Marlize Pistorius, are accused of gross negligence and dereliction of duty after they picked up an 18.1 percent undercount during their post-enumeration survey of Census 2011.
Arrow subsequently retired from StatsSA, and Pistorius was sacked last week after a lengthy internal disciplinary process.
She is now unemployed and will not receive any of the employee contributions to her StatsSA pension, having joined the state agency 13 years ago.
During his tirade last month, Lehohla warned senior StatsSA staff that he was conscious of a series of attempts to sabotage him and the organisation beginning 10 years ago.
Arrow and Pistorius were also accused of theft of the controversial forensic audit report into the appointment of service providers for Census 2011, compiled by the accountant-general.
It accuses the Government Communication and Information System, among others, of fraud and flouting Public Finance Management Act regulations.
Arrow was arrested in May by plain-clothes policemen and the head of security at StatsSA. The arrest happened late on a Friday afternoon so he would be detained for the weekend.
He was also initially refused bail – apparently on the orders of a senior general in the police.
Theft charges have since been dropped against him and Pistorius, but StatsSA’s deputy director-general of corporate services, Akhtari Henning, told The Sunday Independent police were still investigating how the two got their hands on the document.
“When Dr Arrow says I caused him to be arrested, I don’t know how,” Lehohla told staff in his June 16 speech.
“I don’t know how, because he lies through his teeth about the PES (post-enumeration survey). He lies through his teeth about his arrest, which is irresponsible. He’s unfortunately no longer a member of our staff.”
The fallout between Pistorius, Arrow and Lehohla is apparently rooted in their discovery of the 18 percent undercount.
The post-enumeration survey, which audits the quality of the census, was led by Pistorius, with field work beginning in November 2011.
This week Pistorius said her immediate superior, Arrow, had picked up potential pitfalls of the census before it even began – such as capacity – and had tried to alert Lehohla, with the aim of corrective action being taken.
In September 2011, Arrow allegedly alerted the statistician-general that in some instances there were no listings (the process whereby every dwelling unit in an enumeration area is listed), and no proper call centre had been established. Also, some staff had not yet been recruited.
The census enumeration was conducted over about two months from October 9.
In March last year, the census team handed over census questionnaires from 600 sampled enumeration areas to the post-enumeration survey team, which picked up that “more than 20 enumeration areas had no questionnaires”.
“These missing questionnaires from whole areas indicated that there would be a large number of unmatched households and persons, indicative of a huge undercount,” Pistorius told The Sunday Independent.
But StatsSA’s deputy director-general for population and social statistics, Kefiloe Masiteng, alluded this week to Arrow and Pistorius being eager to conclude the PES before Arrow was to go on overseas on leave for a month.
“The work was incomplete. (Lehohla) said to them: ‘Tell me what you need in terms of resources’,” Masiteng said.
Yandiswa Mpetsheni, chief director for national statistical systems, who took over management of the PES after Pistorius was taken off the project, said more field workers were promptly employed for the task.
But Pistorius said this was not the case, saying she and Arrow were given no choice but to relinquish the PES to their colleagues.
“The (statistician-general) was ‘disappointed’ by the undercount resulting from the failures of census to properly count the population and as was reported on by the PES in its preliminary findings,” she told The Sunday Independent.
Some of the “concerns” Lehohla allegedly had related to “exploring a different methodology” – the one apparently used in the 1996 census.
“But that (the 1996 methodology) was a weaker methodology,” Pistorius said.
But again, Mpetsheni and others said this week that the methodology used in 1996 and 2001 was the same that should have been used in 2011, in the interests of comparability.
“An undercount of 18 percent is really unacceptable. No other country has such a high undercount, especially with the kind of financial support we had,” Pistorius said.
She later received strict instructions from Lehohla not to communicate with any member of the re-opened PES team, and disciplinary processes were instituted against her in December.
After submitting the documents she would use as evidence in her disciplinary case on March 29, she was charged with unauthorised possession of the controversial forensic audit report into the appointment of service providers for Census 2011.
Pistorius was then suspended from StatsSA on April 8.
Lehohla now claims “a plot was hatched” two years ago against him and the organisation he leads.
“With the behaviour of Dr Arrow snatching this document, tell me that there is a lot more, that probably Dr Arrow was not alone in this. He must have been with others. This time around I know he was with Marlize,” Lehohla told senior staff.
“In future and shortly in future I’m sure he is going to sing and say who else was in with him… in all kinds of plots that have surrounded this organisation.
“We will rid this organisation of those kinds of plotters just as I did in 2003, and I’m doing it in 2013.
“We will rid that organisation of that malice, but if we think that it will have gone, then we will be deceived because it will come, and come. It is for the leadership, yourselves, to do that, you have to act with integrity and flesh, flesh, no blood, no drop of blood must come from the neck.
“It must be a sword that cuts clean. That’s how we deal with people like thse. If I may use that metaphor, that when you attack you must attack as aggressively to eliminate it completely,” he said.
http://www.iol.co.za/sundayindependent/statssa-chief-s-threats-to-staff-1.1550045#.UjFYAuUZm8o
