Illustrative image: Photos: Tom Barrett / Unsplash and iStock) 
In so many different ways we like to judge each other and our own position in life using numbers.
I don’t need to remind you about this because you already know what happens when you get your numbers wrong. I’m sure that, like me, at some point in your life there was a mix-up with numbers that had a big impact on you. Perhaps your paycheque had the wrong deductions and you either had to be repaid, or worse, like the mayor of Tshwane, had to pay back money (that is still a very strange story).
This is the reason that companies spend so much money on accountants. Because everyone knows what happens if the numbers are wrong (think Steinhoff, Tongaat Hulett, etc).
Tshwane clearly battles to get salaries right. It now has to pay more than R2-billion to workers in the next six months – money it doesn’t have.
To completely and utterly mangle an earlier chronicler, “get your sums right over the year, results in happiness. To get them wrong, results in misery”.
Nersa, the regulator that has consistently shown it is not capable of doing its sums correctly, is another example. Its complete debacle (for which, I’ll bet you a very good lunch, no one has yet been properly punished) means that you now have to pay a lot more for electricity, simply because it refused to listen to Eskom.
Amazingly, Nersa even argued last week that you, as the customer of a council, had no right to know how much that council paid Eskom for its electricity. It actually argued that you did not have the right to know by how much you were being ripped off. It is simply unacceptable that a regulator can display such disregard for the Constitution and be so wrong about the law.
It’s no wonder that our electricity tariffs are out of control.
I suspect that much worse is to come with numbers.
And the US is about to give us the world’s biggest example of what happens when you don’t have numbers you can trust.
The shutdown of the US federal government means that its Bureau of Labor Statistics has not produced proper figures for several weeks. As the Economic Policy Institute noted, for the first time in about 60 years there will be a gap of at least a month in the official figures.
This means that the US Federal Reserve, which has a mandate to maintain employment, is making up policy without the proper numbers.
Imagine the cost to the US, to ordinary people, if it made the wrong interest rate decision because the correct numbers were not available.
And when a central bank gets interest rates wrong it can take years to get control back, simply because you lose credibility.
To make it worse it’s clear that the Trump administration wants the Fed to cut rates. Which means there could even be a political interest in maintaining the shutdown.
Thankfully we do not have a situation like that.
But we are in danger of making a mistake with similar consequences.
This week there was yet another reminder of how we have underfunded our own statistical agency, Statistics South Africa. This has been a problem for a long time, yet the government does not seem to be taking it seriously.
While I get that there are so many competing demands for government money, as my wise predecessor reminded you some time ago, if you can’t trust the agency, you can’t trust the census.
And there are very real consequences if you get things wrong. Particularly for our metros that end up getting either more or less money than they should.
But you can imagine the political argument over the Budget if money gets taken from one place and given to Stats SA. Someone, somewhere will make the obvious point that you could literally be taking money from nurses and giving it to people who work with numbers.
And there are industries that rely on Stats SA.
For example, its published data showing that South Africans are getting married later than we used to. If you’re in the wedding industry you would need to know who you’re aiming at. And while babies don’t automatically follow weddings, those in the baby economy might be interested too.
I think the real point must be that, without proper numbers, as a government and as a country we would lack direction. We would not know what was really going on, or where we were going. We would be continuously surprised by events because we would not have been paying attention.
Schools and hospitals would be in the wrong place, or not exist at all, the money for social grants would run dry, there would be too many police officers or not enough. The list of what we would get wrong is just endless.
The cost of accurate numbers may be expensive. But the result… the result is priceless. DM