NATIONAL PLANNING COMMISSION: Deputy Speaker, I thank Adv Swart for the question. It relates to whether we experienced any serious challenges during the census. Perhaps the most serious challenge that confronted me was the colour of the Statistician- General's suit, which, thankfully, he has now been relieved of. [Laughter.]
You know, it was an interesting challenge. Many of the issues we anticipated and they related to the fact that so many South Africans live in gated environments, and getting into those was difficult in the beginning, but I think a large part of it was overcome. Also, the strategy of Stats SA was to try and recruit enumerators for the areas from which they come, and this did work in large measure, but in more affluent areas there was a battle to try and find people from those areas to work there, so people had to be brought in from outside.
There was concern, and I'm sure the hon Swart was one of the people who raised concern about the sense of criminality in society and whether this would impact on the census. Now, fairly early in the process in one of the suburbs of Johannesburg there was an incident, but looking at the events over the entirety of October, in fact, there were more enumerators at risk of crime, for example a number of attempted rapes and muggings, and so on.
Also, in terms of challenges, towards the end of the process a rather unfortunate event occurred in Durban in which a newspaper had reported that enumerators in KwaZulu-Natal were being paid less than their counterparts elsewhere, so enumerators went on strike and it cost a huge effort to get in there and try to quell the strike on the one hand, but also some supervisors were trying to hold completed questionnaires back. That was resolved and just last week there were events in a place called Silvertown in the Eastern Cape - Kwazekhele - where some 20 000 people were refusing to be enumerated, but I'm sure that the hon Swart would have seen that the Statistician-General himself went in there with a team and persuaded people that it made every bit of sense for them to be enumerated so that we could understand exactly what their circumstances were.
But on balance I think that the census proceeded as planned. The challenges, in the main, were anticipated, and now it's a mopping-up operation and some issues will become clear in the course of the next three weeks or so as they undertake reverse logistics.