Writing in his weekly newsletter on the ANC website, he said the truth would prevail, and the pernicious tendency to falsify reality to advance the particular agendas of forces opposed to the movement and national democratic revolution had to be opposed.

Earlier this week, there was "yet another canard in the making".

"This time the source of the canard was the South African Institute of Race Relations, which made the startling claim that the masses of our people are now poorer than they were in 1996," he said.

On Monday, the SAIRR published a report which claimed that "using the globally accepted measure of poverty, of people living on less than one US dollar per day, poverty has increased in South Africa, both in absolute numbers and proportionally. The proportion of South Africans
living on less than US1 a day doubled between 1996 and 2005".

Mbeki said, however, according to the "Development Indicators Mid-Term Review" published by the Presidency in June, since 2002 strong overall income growth, including the expansion of social grants, had resulted in the rise of the income of the poorest 10 and 20 per cent of the population.

The Review said per capita real income for the poorest 10 percent in 1996 was R522, which increased to R734 by 2006. The figures for the poorest 20 percent were R758 and R1,051.

The review also included, among other things, a Poverty Headcount Index, which showed the percentage of people living below the poverty line dropping from 53.1 percent in 1996 to 43.2 percent in 2006. The review further indicated that nearly 12 million people currently received social grants, and 3.2 percent of GDP was spent on social
grant assistance.

He said the information supplied in the review came from studies carried out by independent economists and institutions not connected to or commissioned by government. The figures for the grants were drawn from the government Social Security Pension System and the National Treasury.

"I mention these facts to emphasise the point that the Presidency did not falsify the figures about poverty, to hide our reality," Mbeki said.

Government programmes had focused on fighting poverty, and it was further refining its integrated offensive against poverty, reaching down to individual households, to improve the effectiveness of its work in this regard.

For its part, the official statistics agency, StatsSA said poverty should be seen "in a broader perspective than merely the extent of low income or low expenditure in the country".

"It is seen here as the denial of opportunities and choices most basic to human development to lead a long, healthy, creative life and to enjoy a decent standard of living, freedom, dignity, self-esteem and respect from others," StatsSA had said.

Mbeki said the SAIRR relied on a definition of poverty that was radically different from the one spelt out in the RDP and described by StatsSA. "Necessarily, this produces a distortion of our reality which amounts to a falsification of this reality.

"The SAIRR has positioned itself as the liberal alternative to our movement.

"We must assume that because of this it is averse to using [other reliable] sources of information."

It could also have used the recently released StatsSA Community Survey 2007, more accurately to report on improvements in the standard of living of the masses of the people."Its obvious unwillingness to do any of these things, choosing instead to discover statistics that serve the political purpose of discrediting our movement and government underlines the imperative that we must at all times stand ready to chain the canards," Mbeki said.