In addition to financial constraints, Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) has a gaping hole of vacant posts, hampering its effectiveness.
This was revealed during the presentation of the national statistical service’s 2025/26 annual performance plan before the Portfolio Committee on Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation.
Statistician-general Risenga Maluleke, together with the leadership of the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation, was on hand to brief the committee on its annual performance and strategic plans.
Maluleke told MPs that Stats SA currently has about 720 vacant posts, leading to challenges in terms of performance of its core functions and capacity to meet data needs for policy-making.
These vacancies are spread across the agency’s different divisions, including statistical support and informatics, which is the ICT environment and has 72 vacancies (30%).
He revealed the loss of staff members at Stats SA has increased, from about 98 to 101 staff members per annum, to losing in the region of about 128 to 131 per annum.
“When we are losing at that rate, in the last financial year, we were allowed to only fill seven positions. So, provided we don’t lose any staff members from now on in terms of resignations, death or retirement, and keep our current staff cohort, we are going to take the next 100 years to fill the 720 positions, if we are allowed only seven positions.
“The risk if we don’t arrest this situation…it will have serious consequences and our quality will start imploding, and indeed, in the end, we might have to close Stats SA.”
Discussing the grim financial position at Stats SA, he said not only is it struggling with paying for goods and services, but the agency does not have enough money for the current “warm bodies” on its payroll.
He said the agency overspends yearly because people from government “can’t be fired”.
“We can’t demobilise them; it must follow a particular process but Stats SA is not sufficiently funded to even pay its salary bill. If it was a private sector [entity], Stats SA would have closed by now.”
For the current financial year, the agency received R2.7 billion funding from National Treasury, which is not far off from what it received in the years 2023/24.
“Even in that year, we didn’t have enough money to fund or to pay salaries; that’s why we have continued to overspend. The fact that two financial years down the line, we are still at the same level of funding means the situation is quite dire.
“No additional funding has been allocated for this financial year and filling critical vacancies is a serious issue, as well as our outdated ICT infrastructure, which puts us at risk.”
Maluleke told the committee the statistical support and informatics division has a budget of R306 million, with which it must also launch a new website.
The division is focused on insightful data, agile operating and transformation capabilities.
Turning to the risks within the ICT space, he said these are much more serious, not only when it comes to human resources, but also at systems level.
“The downtimes that we experience, coming from the SITA side, but also having to make sure that we protect our data. We have a big data centre…if it were to collapse, it would not only collapse the functioning of Stats SA, but the nation from the side of the economy as well as population and the massive data that we have.
“We do engage our users annually, so we know what our users are saying as regards to the quality of our data, the regularity and of course, where they even suggest what needs to be changed. On cyber security, we invest in it because we’ve seen how many government departments get hit every quarter.”
In terms of innovations, he said this will involve upgrading Stats SA’s ICT environment within funding. “We are now looking at phase three, which is to implement an agile system so that we can deliver better, or we can have a better delivery model, automate statistical production processes, introduce new digital tools for collection and reporting, standardise software and systems.
“At this stage, we have a lot of systems we are running on. We have what we call a statistical analysis system that is SAS, we have Microsoft and GroupWise, we have a lot of systems, and they need to be standardised.”
Following the briefing, the portfolio committee expressed concerns about financial constraints and vacancies at the agency.
Regarding vacancy rates, the committee says they impact the quality and timeliness of statistical products, as well as the agency's ability to retain skilled personnel.
It has raised concerns as to whether Stats SA’s infrastructure is fit-for-purpose to meet the demands of a technologically-evolving world, with committee chairperson Teliswa Mgweba noting the ICT systems are outdated and urging the entity to invest more in modernising its systems.
According to Mgweba, modernising ICT infrastructure is crucial for maintaining data integrity and improving operational efficiency.
The committee urged Stats SA to develop a strategy for retaining skilled workers and explore partnerships to enhance data collection and statistical capabilities.
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