Faizel Patel, 2016-08-29
Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) says it may have erred by not including the religious demographics in the latest population figures.
Stats SA released its mid-year population estimates last week revealing that the country’s population now stands at 55.91 million people.
The national statistical service says South Africa is entering what it describes as a demographic winter, the dwindling growth in the population.
Statistician General Pali Lehola says the last time statistics reflected the population by religious demographics was 15 years ago.
“The last we did that was in 1996, and then in 2001 and in 2011 we didn’t break the population by religion. The consultative process was such that we had quite a number of questions and the whole issue is where do we cut off.”
Lehola says while they believed that religion wasn’t mandatory in the census, it was the wrong thing to leave the question out.
“I suppose this is an injustice from the statistics office to some of the very, very crucial users to which census data is used. We are correcting that injustice.”
The omittance of religious statistics by Stats SA is gravely concerning; especially for Muslim as Saudi authorities calculate quotas for the annual hajj based on recent population figures.
Currently South Africa has a quota of two thousand Muslims that can perform hajj annually.
0 Comments