So, I did the work the journalist and politician should have done.

I found the source of the '15 million unregistered people' at the World Bank

the TL;DR is the journalist conflated unregistered citizens with stateless people. they are not the same.

https://blogs.worldbank.org/voices/global-identification-challenge-who-are-1-billion-people-without-proof-identity https://twitter.com/HermanMashaba/status/1327268066913382400

The World Bank data describes people who *are citizens* of a country or who are legally entitled to register but who do not have access to formal identity documents such as birth certificates or ID books.

@HermanMashaba

In an explanation note, the World Bank also specifically writes:

'The Dataset cannot provide information about ID coverage gaps for marginalized populations, such as migrants, refugees, and stateless persons.'

https://id4d.worldbank.org/sites/id4d.worldbank.org/files/2018-08/ID4D%20Data%20Notes%20revised%20082918.pdf

@HermanMashaba

That I had to go and read 5 different articles & download a dataset should NOT be my job @HermanMashaba but your job as a public figure.

The Citizen journalist also should have done a better job, but perhaps a cautionary sign is that *the figure he cited appears NOWHERE else*

Let's repeat the summary:

The Citizen newspaper claim that South Africa has more than 15 million unregistered people basically refers to *legal residents who don't have birth certs or ID docs* and is not connected at all to research into undocumented migrants.

@hermanmashaba

But if anybody had bother to even consider whether it was plausible that one in four people in South Africa was an undocumented migrant, this claim would have fallen apart even without me needing to review the World Bank dataset and metadata.