ANC Gauteng chairperson Paul Mashatile called for private and public organisations to focus on using high-quality data to enable proper planning, as inaccurate data and information produced ineffective economic initiatives, interventions and policies.

Mashatile was speaking at master data firm Pilog’s data quality management conference last month.

He highlighted that South Africa had the potential to grow beyond 4%, even in the current international economic climate, but that it was growing at barely 2%. While there was a myriad of reasons for poor economic growth, there was a significant element of ineffective policy decisions and interventions, owing to poor-quality data and information that had reduced the potential for growth.

However, Mashatile noted that all elements of South African society were hamstrung by a lack of trust, including both the private sector, which consistently invested outside the country, and the public sector, which did not have the unity of purpose or consistency of policy required for stability.

Acknowledging the progress made in improving economic opportunities and reducing poverty for the majority of people and noting the squandered opportunities for better performance, he said that foreign direct investment (FDI) would only follow investment by the private and public sectors.

“Our efforts to achieve higher growth are affected by the global economic environment, but, if we look at the [human and natural] resources in the domestic economy, we can ratchet growth much higher than 2% in the coming years.

“The Finance Minister has revised the country’s growth for this year down from 2.5% to 2%, and China is also not growing as fast as it was in previous decades, which is affecting South Africa.”

However, when comparing South Africa with other African countries, there was significant potential for higher growth.

Mashatile called for the local private and public sectors to improve the attractiveness of the country to bolster the local case for FDI.

“Critique our plans, give us access to data and help us to develop and source skilled data engineers. However, there must also be an emphasis on the urgency for transforming the South African economy radically to be more inclusive. Only if this can be achieved will we be able to build a nonracial democracy and prosperous South Africa.”

There was thus a critical need to reduce poverty by creating more jobs and, subsequently, a better life for the country’s people, he said.

While most of the jobs would and should be created in the private sector, government would have to effectively fulfil the important role of policy formulation and promulgation to enable this.

“We need proper data to take government’s programmes forward and ensure that South Africa grows as Africa grows.”