NATIONAL PLANNING COMMISSION: Chairperson, firstly, I omitted to do this, but let me express appreciation to colleagues in the House who had greatly assisted, because I think the presence of Members of Parliament had greatly allayed the fears and concerns that people might otherwise have had.
In respect to the safety of staff, these were road accidents, and I think it's just a manifestation of some of the difficulties we do encounter in these circumstances. I want to say that there's an implicit risk in employing 130 000 people who had no interest in remaining in the process, so the safety of assets is always a difficulty in these challenges. There were also some other instances that we became aware of, such as one in Tokai here in Cape Town in which, when the enumerator arrived at the house people tried to open the gate and the gate fell over and actually killed a child.
These kinds of things are very, very terrible, but I think what's important is that the Statistician-General got around to all of these areas, spoke to families and was a great comfort in the circumstances.
In respect of refusals, as of last week we knew that 22 000 households had refused. Now people would have seen again a top-level team of Stats SA going out, waving letters, threatening to arrest people and so on, but there were 22 000 households. At one level it's a very high number, but in the grander scheme of things it's 0,15% from whom there were just absolute refusals and nothing could be done to persuade people otherwise.
I don't know, but we did encounter in some areas that in households in which there were people on the margins - non-South African citizens who were afraid of being found out - there was just a blank refusal and I know that in some instances the Statistician-General invited the local police to go to houses and people were persuaded to behave differently. I think that relative, both to 1996 and 2001 - the hon Swart is correct, of course it's early days yet - when we look at the number of houses counted, and evaluate the number of refusals and the number of call-backs that enumerators had to make, we've actually done exceedingly well this year. Thank you.