All living organisms germinate or get born and die. In human populations, this process is followed, aggregated and reported upon by national statistical authorities. In South Africa, Statistics South Africa takes on this noble task.
From 1995 to 2000, I was a chief director responsible for demography, vital statistics, surveys and censuses at Statistics South Africa. I have had the privilege of observation and research through a study I conducted in Bophuthatswana in 1986, while I served in the statistics office from 1982 to 1994. The study revealed the causes of a low rate of registration of vital statistics in Bophuthatswana.
I was thus in a position to address and set systems towards remedying the low rate of recording of, especially, births and deaths when I started work at Statistics South Africa. Marriages and divorces had better recording outcomes. This came about possibly because of material benefits and potential forfeitures that matrimony risks and privileges it carries.
Births performed the worst, while recording of deaths was much better. But the recording of male deaths was higher than that of females. This discrimination even in death had to do with inheritance and succession rights. These are patrilineal.
In 2000, I became the Statistician-General of South Africa, a position I held up to October 2017. In 2001, I was confronted with mourning either the death of my cousin or that of statistics. My cousin passed on in Crossroads and, upon arrival, I asked for the documents for his cause of death. The presiding medical officer had recorded “bizarre condition” as my cousin’s cause of death.
I asked what that meant, but I further asked why he had not filled in another part of the form. To this he responded that it was not important as it was for statistics. The changes to recording of cause of death were a painstaking joint operation between StatsSA and health departments primarily, and when a health official ignored it, I felt betrayed in my capacity as Statistician-General, but at that point in time I was the bereaved. So I chose to mourn the death of my cousin rather than to mourn the death of statistics. That battle over cause of death would have its day in court.
Statistics South Africa releases statistics on Causes of Death annually. In their reports, the causes of death have a clause called the underlying cause-of-death. This phenomenon is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as "the disease or injury which initiated the train of events leading directly to death, or the circumstances of the accident or violence which produced the fatal injury".
In South Africa, life has been so cheapened to the extent that when death has occurred, politicians go on and on to explain the death away. An instant that was different was when Andries Tatane was shot and killed in a service delivery protest in Ficksburg in 2011, and Bheki Cele immediately immediately visited to commiserate with the family and did not explain the death away. But that was then.
The cause of death of six-year-old Michael Komape, who, in 2014 drowned in a cesspit in a school toilet because of his desire to acquire education . His death continues to be explained away, including in the courts of law. The chorus of explaining death away was joined by Life Esidimeni, the Marikana 34, who were mowed down; the 21 school children who perished in the Enyobeni Tavern disaster in East London; the Pongola death of the 19 school children who perished under the coal hungry traders; and many others in between, before the death toll of 17 and counting the latest Hammanskraal cholera victims.
It is clear that the chorus of mortality is defined largely by race and class. All these point to dramatic failures and reversals of the promise of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), the austerity measures against infrastructure-related investment has a direct impact o driving these tragic events.
Key among these is the dramatic failure of the development of human settlements. As a consequence, South Africa is soon to enter a new cause of death in the lexicon of the World Health Organisation Cause of Death protocol. Amongst them will be continued neo-liberal policies as a new category of cause of death.
The underlying cause of death refers to that one which initiated the chain of pathological events that led to death. It is clear that such pathological events are infrastructure deficits that led to the cesspit, the Marikana, the Enyobeni, the Pongola, and the current and still counting Hammanskraal deaths.
We have run out of the neo-liberal rope, which has now qualified Eskom as a future cause of new deaths when the poor will be facing the fiercest death rates during these winter months. How are we going to explain those deaths away?
Dr Pali Lehohla is the director of the Economic Modelling Academy, 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.
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