Unreliable and inflated statistics on the number of foreign nationals in South Africa have contributed to the growth of the xenophobia which has triggered violence against them, writes AllAfrica staffer Timothy Allen in this blog entry.
As news reports of the recent spate of xenophobic violence spread in South Africa and internationally, they mirrored one another in their estimates of the number of Zimbabweans and in the total number of migrants from the continent living in South Africa.
The Mail & Guardian reported an estimate of three million Zimbabweans and five million in total, and the government news agency, BuaNews, posted on AllAfrica, referred to three to four million Zimbabweans. The Christian Science Monitor and Bloomberg News said the same.
But where are these numbers drawn from? And how accurate are they?
Hussein Solomon, director of the Centre for International Political Studies at the University of Pretoria, recently cited a figure of 2.5 to 4 million "illegal immigrants."
In fact, Solomon reported the same number in 2000. The basis of the estimate appears to go even further back: a 1995 survey by the Human Resources Council. It seems the survey asked respondents, "Do any people who are not South African citizens live in the houses around this property?".
Just a few years later, in a 2003 report, the government agency, Statistics South Africa, estimated there were between 500,000 and one million undocumented migrants in South Africa.
As for the number of Zimbabweans, a background paper published a year ago by the Forced Migration Project at the University of the Witswatersrand in Johannesburg acknowledged the figure of three million Zimbabweans - but noted it was either "extrapolated from ungeneralisable data" - " deportations, border crossings, asylum applications and the like - or "based on conjecture."
So it appears that, despite the fresh waves of refugees entering South Africa from Zimbabwe in the two months since the March 29 elections, the immigration figures are actually several years old, and have almost certainly changed in unpredictable ways.
Estimating the number of migrants in any country is tricky, and the difficulties are aggravated when the migrants do not have proper documents. There are few reliable statistics and, unsurprisingly, it is the larger estimates that make headlines and in turn drive perceptions and even policy.
Take for instance this reported quote from the then-Minister of Home Affairs, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, in 1997: "If we as South Africans are going to compete for scarce resources with millions of aliens who are pouring into South Africa, then we can bid goodbye to our Reconstruction and Development Programme." Or his later comment that with "an illegal population estimated at between 2.5 million and 5 million", and each migrant costing the state "say R1,000 per annum", government spending "becomes billions of rands per year." Some arms of government appear to have taken their cue from rhetoric such as this. The Department of Home Affairs was held responsible in 2005 for the high number of deaths at the Lindela Deportation Center, with Human Rights Watch criticising incompetent and corrupt refugee officials.
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And police may have been instrumental in protecting immigrants in the past few weeks, but barely four months ago they were accused of the brutal treatment of refugees during an illegal raid on a Johannesburg church sheltering migrants.
Statistics can be a powerful tool in describing or solving problems. But bad statistics can aggravate them. Good data do exist (for example, see the work of the South African Migration Project), but the results of the most informative surveys do not reduce easily to soundbites. The numbers on immigration being bandied around, with the message they convey of South Africans being overwhelmed and their taxes gobbled up by foreigners, can only have exacerbated rising tensions between citizens and immigrants.
