Angola statistics ‘being manipulated’ – Economist

LUANDA, Angola 

Angolan economist, Carlos Rosado de Carvalho said on Thursday that the figures on employment and unemployment published by the Angolan National Statistics Institute (INE) were unreal, believing that the public institution is being politically manipulated.

He said the data from the Angolan INE is not reliable, as there is an enormous credibility deficit towards the institute, which fantastically says that in a pandemic year, 737,215 jobs were created.

“The government must explain because I do not understand either. The most fantastic data of the INE numbers are not the comparison of numbers with the quarter, but the comparison with the year,” Carlos Rosado de Carvalho said on Thursday in statements to Lusa.

“And what we see when we compare the numbers of the first quarter of 2021 with that of 2020, we all know that in the first quarter of 2020 there was no pandemic, the economy began to shut down in the second quarter of 2020,” he noted.

The INE, he said, “tells us that the employed population increased by 730,215 and no one can believe that. How is it that at the end of a year of the pandemic we have more jobs than we had before the pandemic,” he asked.

The unemployment rate in Angola stood at 30.5% in the first quarter of 2021, a drop of 1.5 percentage points against the same period of the previous year, according to figures from Angola’s National Statistics Institute (INE).

Between January and March, the unemployment rate was estimated at 30.5%, which was 0.1 percentage point lower than in the previous quarter (30.65%) and 1.5 percentage points lower than the same quarter of the previous year (32.0%).

In the first quarter of 2021, the estimated unemployment rate of 4,744,020 persons aged 15 years or over decreased by 0.1% (3,602 persons) from the previous quarter.

However, there was an increase of 8,563 unemployed persons year-on-year, representing an increase of 0.2%.

The employed population aged 15 and over was estimated at 10,821,205, up 0.7% from the previous quarter (up 71,717 people) and 7.3% from the same quarter of 2020.

In his generic approach to the data published by INE, Rosado reiterated his disquiet about the possibility that “737,215 jobs were created in a pandemic year” when, he noted, the Angolan President, João Lourenço, promised in 2017 during the electoral campaign the creation of 500,000 jobs.

“These are figures that nobody believes because INE is politically manipulated. INE gives the data that the government wants it to give, and therefore nobody trusts INE’s data,” he said.

“There is a huge credibility deficit regarding INE. Nobody believes that 737,215 jobs have been created in the pandemic,” he added.

Carlos Rosado de Carvalho reiterated the possibility that there may be some manipulation of INE’s data because he justified that the INE’s data now supports what the government says.

The government, he said, talks before the figures are published, as is the case with GDP (Gross Domestic Product) for the second quarter, which is only due to be published in July, but the minister for the economy and planning has already started talking about the figures, and now we will see what happens.

He also stated that the unemployment data for the first quarter of 2021 was published late and reaffirmed a huge credibility deficit in INE and that the recent figures, he stressed, confirm this.

“Nobody believes those figures, and they confirm this because the economy continues to be confined to the sanitary cordon in Luanda, and those figures do not match reality,” he said.

The reality, he noted, is that companies are closing down, “people are becoming unemployed, and the INE is telling us that the employed population has increased in a pandemic year,” he said.

In the first quarter of 2021, INE said the employment rate stood at 62.6%, down 0.3% compared to the previous quarter (62.8%) and an increase of 3.3% compared to the same quarter (60.7%).

The INE report noted that the public calamity situation due to Covid-19 resulted in a temporary slowdown in the production of goods and services, particularly non-essential ones, as well as restrictions on the free movement of people, particularly in the case of Luanda, which has been under a sanitary cordon for over a year.