Speaker, the question is about the recent strikes and whether a "no work, no pay" rule will be enforced. The answer is that the "no work, no pay" rule is a policy of government and is administered by the Minister for the Public Service and Administration. We are aware that the Minister will implement the policy through Treasury. It, therefore, is not dependent upon me; it is government policy. It will be implemented.
To answer the question of whether the strike has had any effect on departments, I should say yes. Indeed, it has affected the national and provincial departments in different ways. In some provinces we had an 80% shutdown, while in others we had a 20% shutdown; so it did affect them, but the situation differed from province to province. In areas where there was a total semishutdown of the head offices and no operations could take place, the districts had to operate from somewhere and this resulted in valuable school days being lost.
The national department only closed the section which deals with matric certificates; all other sections were working. We closed that section deliberately because we did not want to risk anybody interfering with the matric certificates. Thank you.