NATIONAL PLANNING COMMISSION: Chairperson, thanks hon Singh. I think it was on Thursday last week that 95 000 enumerators were paid. It was an exceedingly smooth operation. The field staff supervisors and coordinators will be paid later, but that's by contractual arrangement.
The people who have not yet received payment - I think there's about 13 000 to 14 000 who should've been paid, but weren't - in the main were not paid because of bank account difficulties. The agreement throughout was that individuals needed to have a bank account and that the money would be transferred. Now you can't come along and say we should pay it into a friend's bank account. This has been the kind of problem that we've encountered, because so many of the enumerators are normally unemployed. Some of them are in debt and were afraid that as soon as the money was transferred into their account somebody would actually put a lien on that money. It's been that kind of problem. In discussion with the Statistician- General yesterday we talked through these issues and I'm pretty sure that they will all be resolved.
In respect of the staff battling with transport, there were just over 6 200 motor vehicles hired and the endeavour was to try and get by with them. I know that from time to time - I saw it in the area where I live as well - you'd see this large number of people sitting around there, and I know that the hon George had drawn to my attention the fact that in one area people had seen or believed that they'd seen enumerators with erasers changing data and so on. We went into that and it was proven to be incorrect, but thanks to the hon George and his constituent through whom the matter was drawn to our attention and we could follow up on that.
But it has been a rather difficult process. The key issue has been the quality of the supervision in the area, and given the vast number of people, there are sometimes glitches in training and so on. Thanks.