THE crippling shortage of timely statistics in Namibia is receiving high-level attention and should be alleviated when the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), currently under the wing of the National Planning Commission (NPC), becomes an autonomous state agency in the foreseeable future.

Opening the 17th Statistical Meeting of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in Windhoek yesterday, NPC Director General Tom Alweendo said he has targeted November this year to wrap up this process. "The target is ambitious but we believe it is doable," the new NPC DG said.

Alweendo told the meeting that "the history of statistical transformation in Namibia has not been exciting". "I believe that we have taken too long to reform our systems," he said. Namibia became critically aware of its lack of timely economic statistics during the height of the global meltdown last year. With no official quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) statistics produced as a rule, Government and the private sector could only speculate about the severity of the impact on Namibia.

Alweendo, then still Governor of the Bank of Namibia (BoN), at numerous occasions expressed his frustration with the status quo. Last June, the CBS eventually released the GDP data for the first quarter of 2009. However, the next official figures publicly released by the bureau was only a year later, when the CBS said that the Namibian economy contracted by 0,8 per cent in 2009.

Namibia remains as much in the dark regarding the performance of its economy this year as it did last year. Although key indicators suggest a recovery, the BoN recently was unable to say how much economic growth was in the first quarter of 2010. New BoN Governor Ipumbu Shiimi, like his predecessor, blamed the lack of timely statistics.

Alweendo yesterday said that the NPC is "currently making renewed efforts to resolve the issue of an autonomous statistics body". CBS Deputy Statistician Sylvester Mbangu told Nampa that Cabinet has approved the step and that the bureau would become independent in the first quarter of next year. He said the CBS has already prepared a new statistics law, which it intends submitting to Cabinet.