If you ever thought being a bean counter was an easy job, you need to look around. There is at least one who was hanged by Stalin over a census outcome in Russia that did not favour the glory of the Bolshevik revolution.
The Russian numbers were down, reflecting the effects of famine. Stalin terminated the life of the messenger for bringing bad numerical tidings. Many have left their jobs through the window, thanks to politicians who were irritated that the numbers were disrupting their political slumber.
But the ordeal of Andreas Georgiou has been the most intricate. His stubbornness is one of a Spartan who faced Greece. More than a decade ago, I reported on the ordeal of Georgiou in one of my columns, saying he was the Galileo Galilei of statistics.
In history, we know that Galileo, the “father” of observational astronomy, discovered that the Earth rotated daily and revolved around the Sun. The Roman Inquisition considered this heretical and forced him to recant. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
Georgiou faced similar treatment. Among other charges in the prosecution sheet against him, is “simple slander”. In Greek law, a simple slander charge means being charged by speaking truthfully about the wrongdoings of an individual. If, in the estimation of the individual the truthful wrongdoing embarrasses them, then the offence warrants the offended to take the repeater of the truthful pronouncement to court for embarrassing them.
In his line of duty as the chief statistician of Greece, Georgiou established that his predecessors were cooking the statistics of government debt and related indices. He then corrected the numerological misdemeanour. The consequences were not pleasant for Greece. His tormentors labelled Georgiou enemy number one in the country.
In fact, his predecessors became witnesses in the case against him, on the matter of correcting the numbers. The culprits who were to face the music for falsifying national datasets became glorified heroes who banged at the doors of justice, crying simple slander.
But, finally, there is a major step in the right direction towards freeing Georgiou from a decade of senseless persecution by the Greek authorities on this matter of measurement.
Georgiou had this to say upon the verdict: “With particular satisfaction and joy, I was informed of the decision in my favour by the European Court of Human Rights (Echr) that found that my human rights were violated – due to an unfair trial – when I was convicted of ‘violation of duty’ for not putting the corrected 2009 government deficit and debt figures to a vote in November 2010. Echr even asked for a retrial at the Greek Supreme Court (Court of Cassation).
“In particular, Echr ruled that my human rights were violated when the Greek courts refused my lawful request to submit a pretrial question to the competent Court of Justice of the European Union (Cjeu) for the correct interpretation of the rules of the European Statistics Code of Practice that must be applied when producing official statistics in EU member states.
“In particular, the question that was not put to the Cjeu concerned the correct interpretation of the European Statistics Code of Practice ethics rule, which states that ‘The heads of the National Statistical Institutes… have the sole responsibility for deciding on statistical methods, standards and procedures, and on the content and timing of statistical releases.’
“This European rule, under the Principle of Professional Independence in the Code of Practice, is of fundamental and crucial importance for the reliability of the official statistics of EU member states and their protection from all kinds of political and governmental interventions – namely the pathology which led to the phenomenon of ‘Greek statistics’. It is for this reason that the decision of Echr, with its recognition that my conviction by the Greek courts was unfair, is especially gratifying.
“It is also widely acknowledged that my own tenure (August 2010 – August 2015) at Elstat, the National Statistical Institute of Greece, for which I have been repeatedly and continuously prosecuted for almost 12 years now, restored the credibility of Greece’s official statistics and allowed Greece and its partners worldwide to rely on these data, ridding Greece of the stigma created by the destructive practices that my administration at Elstat overturned.”
Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking is correct in saying: “The quiet statisticians have changed our world; not by discovering new facts or technical developments, but by changing the ways that we reason, experiment and form our opinions.”
But there was nothing quiet about Georgiou, whose parting shot read like Horatius: '“Then out spake brave Horatius, the captain of the Gate: To every man upon this Earth death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his Gods?” Bean counting is not for the faint-hearted.
Dr Pali Lehohla is the director of the Economic Modelling Academy, a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa.
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