Chairperson: Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen of the media and our colleagues. Welcome to the second briefing of the day. It's the second briefing of the second round of the reporting cycle of the Programme of Action. Welcome to Cape Town, Cape Town shall we make sure that you are able to hear us? Can you respond if you are able to hear us?

Thanks very much. Firstly let me welcome Minister Fraser-Moleketi who's the chair of the Governance and Administration Cluster of government. She's with the full team that will make sure that you get comprehensive answers to your questions. Firstly she's also with the Director General of Department of Provincial and Local Government, DG Msengana-Ndlela. And also on my right is the acting DG of Home Affairs, Mr. Jackson McKay, with a uniform at Home Affairs. And I'm sure all of you didn't know that Home Affairs have got a uniform. I'm just being corrected that it's the Immigration Branch that has got a uniform. And also the Deputy Director General Rufus Mmutlana from SAMDI.

And also I have the Government Information Officer, Michelle Williams, who's sitting next to me here. The Minister is going to do a PowerPoint presentation that I think is going to be distributed to you shortly. You should have with you at the moment the statement of the Governance and Administration Cluster, and I see there are some other gazettes that are being distributed that you should have copies of. Cape Town, the statement will follow to you, I aware that you don't have it yet. But we've just emailed it, it should be with you. So I'll hand over to the Minister, the Minister will do the PowerPoint presentation and then we'll follow with questions to the panel, not only to the Minister, thanks.

Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi: Thank you very much, Programme Director, or do you have another name seeing that we have the immigration uniform here today? Ja, thank you very much. I'd also want to indicate that the DDGs who are present here are here in capacity as acting DGs, that's from the Department of Public Service and Administration and SAMDI.

As indicated in the introduction, this is one of those briefings that form part of our cycle, and it's clearly as part of our commitment to report on how we are doing in terms of the business unusual approach that the President has called us all to... especially as from the beginning of this year, and I want to remind you what he said. He said what this change needs is relentless driving and leadership from our senior managers, from our elected representatives, both those who serve as members of the government and those who in the legislatures hold the machinery of government to account. Business unusual requires extraordinary commitment, requires extraordinary commitment, dedication and may I say it patriotism, close quotes.

Actually I'm attributing a quote that I made to the President, so just review that, because this is what I had raised the previous time inline with his business unusual...

I think essentially this forward what I do want to emphasise is the need for a huge push within the public service, and this is in-line with our broad policy areas, and our apex priorities, which fits into the areas of promoting good governance, strengthening the capacity of the state, achieving and maintaining optimal organisation of the state and developing and enhancing the state's transversal systems.

The program of action of the Governance and Admin Cluster for 2008 was approved by Cabinet on 5 March 2008, and the priorities derived from government's commitment to improve its services to the people is very clearly the 2004 electoral mandate, the resolution of the January 2008 Cabinet Lekgotla and the President's State of the Nation address on the 8th of February 2008.

You would have seen that out of the Polokwane resolutions these were all in-line with furthering the mandate, electoral mandate that we received from the people, with the 2004 elections. In terms of our Apex priority projects, and here I'm looking at priority projects 15, 16 and 17 we've received an earlier report at our last briefing and in terms of the current report I do want to say that on regularising employment and performance agreement at the designated levels we have seen by 30th of June 2008 that there was a 38% response rate that equals 56 departments.

In terms of this 71% of national departments has complied with the signing of performance agreements and 57% of provincial departments. These performance agreements had to be completed and signed by the 31st of May. We are going to take this matter forward and there will be letters going out as a gentle reminder today on this particular matter to all those executives, those executive authority members at national and provincial departments, very clearly we're not doing as well as we should on that one.

In terms of the filling of posts, I want to make a correction, we don't have five DG positions vacant but four. There are three national DG positions vacant and one provincial DG position vacant. In terms of the provinces it is still the Northern Cape that's having a difficulty in recruiting a Director General at an appropriate level with the requisite competence and qualifications to fill that position. In terms of CFOs we have six CFO positions vacant at national level and four provincial posts vacant. In terms of the Deputy Director Generals we have nationally 27 vacancies, but that may well also have changed, we'll verify that further. And this is out of 131 posts.

During the period between March and May 2008 the percentage of senior managers at local government was as follows. At the municipal manager level we had a vacancy rate of between 12 and 14,1%, in terms of signed performance agreements we've seen... well, let me go back. The vacancy rate... we previously had a vacancy rate of 12%, it has increased to 14,1% and this is due to the fact that various municipal managers' contracts came to an end and there's also a question around the credibility of the data. On the signed performance agreements for the previous period it was 74% and it has now gone down to 52,6%. This is also partially due to the fact that this is the new financial year requirement to complete performance agreements.

I've spoken earlier about the municipal managers and the increase that's there, and so this is being dealt with. In terms of the regularisation of employment and performance agreements, again at the designated level, on section 57 managers here you see the vacancy rate has increased from 18% to 21%, and again this is a matter that's being dealt with and it's about performance... sorry contract periods coming to an end. On the section 57 managers that have signed their performance agreements, those without signed agreements have decreased from 717 to 652.

The provinces that have the least section 57 managers with signed performance agreements are the Northern Cape and the Free State. Project 16 that looks at integrated planning across the spheres, here we do want to say that we've seen the implementation of the alignment of planning frameworks across the three spheres of government, service providers are at work in six out of the ten pilot districts, and we've identified the districts in each of the provinces. It's Frances Baard in the Northern Cape, Mopani in Limpopo, West Rand Gauteng, in Xhariep the Free State, and Dr. Kenneth Kaunda the former southern district in the North West and OR Tambo in the Eastern Cape. And these are the ones where work is underway on integrated planning. Two of the remaining four districts namely Metsweding in Gauteng, Gert Sibande in Mpumalanga, are concluding service level agreements while with appointed service providers, whilst the Amajuba district in KwaZulu-Natal and Sedibeng in Gauteng are at the final stages of the procurement process.

A proposal that we have presented was the development of a strategic national development planning capacity and this was approved, and our January Lekgotla directed that the operational plan be developed in 2008, and will be presented at the next Lekgotla in January 2009. Various national strategic planning machineries of countries have been studied in terms of a national commission being put in place.

An operational plan will set out milestones and deal with the technical expertise as well as the institutional capacity that's required, outlining logistical arrangements for the entire process, and the policy unit is meeting with various stakeholders for input on the construction of operational plans.

On project 17 which is the improving of civic services we have previously reported that the Department of Home Affairs has reduced their ID turnaround times from 160 days to 103 days. Their turnaround time has now been reduced to 79 days, that's in April 2008. And this is through the ID track and trace system which is a functional system and I believe this is a huge improvement in Home Affairs. Also the top of 40 officers that account for 50% in the volume of Home Affairs services, such as ID re-issues, temporary ID certificates and temporary passports were successfully equipped with online fingerprint equipment and training was also provided. Now this is very clearly a very important interim mechanism put in place whilst people await the permanent documentation. An additional service level agreement has been included... concluded that extends the scope of services with service providers delivering and collecting IDs. The minister had on a previous occasion mentioned that negotiations were underway between the Post Office and Home Affairs regarding the distribution of uncollected ID documents, and this has been concluded. And then by the end of April this year as well we've seen a total of 102 agents put in place at customer service centres, 22 agents for the second line case resolution based at head office have been appointed as well.

On and as part of our good governance focus on anti-corruption I think the big issue here is that 150 municipalities will have local government anti-corruption strategies by December this year. There is an implementation approach for the... of the fraud prevention plan. I'd also want to state that the second issue the draft communications strategy that's finalised, and rollout will start in district municipalities... has started last month, seeing that we're in July now, DG. And then of course the next issue is the fact that we have the third national anti-corruption summit taking place on the 4th and 5th of August, and I trust that the fourth estate will be present in the summit as participants, not just to cover the summit. We're also looking at a communications strategy in this regard to take forward the work of the summit.

Another focus area for us in good governance is our gender and disability programmes. We have seen a 2% growth of women in the senior management service across the public service as from March 2007 to March 2008 and this is the data we obtained from Persal. It's not good enough for us in terms of our commitment to meet the 50% target of women in he senior management service, and we are calling for a very big push by directors general and heads of department to ensure that we do more work in this regard. So much as we have 34% as I said I think it's not good enough.

An audit on the gender focal points was conducted by the office on the status of women, and from that report, that audit we've seen that 31 departments have appointed gender focal points. We also have a concern that the level of these focal points in instances is rather low but there will be a comprehensive report in this regard. We are developing workplace forums for women managers, maybe women ministers also need that, but we have workplace forums for women managers and this is to ensure that there's sound networking amongst women managers to share experiences, deal with challenges and look at the successes that they should share in order to use that as their best practise across.

We will have a gender indaba next month on the 18th and 19th of August. And here we'd look at the eight principles... the action plan for gender equality and women's empowerment. I've made the point around the challenges in achieving the target, and looking at the human resource development strategic framework that targets women for skills and capacity development, or should, we're trying to ensure that there is a greater pool of women with prospects for upward mobility to senior management service positions, and that's why the sustainable pool process is so important, where there's been a particular initiative targeting women in the middle management for their upward mobility through an intensive training program within the senior management service.

We also have a draft policy document as well as a directive on reasonable accommodation for people living with disability, and here we're also pushing for the two percent, the attaining of the two percent target in 2009. Our human resource development strategic framework also targets people with disabilities for skills and capacity development, and this is in order to develop a larger pool of people with disabilities and identifying them for upward mobility.
On our Batho Pele focus, workshops on Batho Pele change management that change management engagement programme has been conducted, and we are reaching 1 132 officials from 261 municipalities, and this is 92% of the municipalities in the country. Some trained... some municipalities that have already had training has requested DPSA to assist in fast-tracking the implementation and rollout of the program. Gauteng municipalities are requesting a second round of training and here these cover municipalities such as Sedibeng, Mogale City, Ekhuruleni, the West Rand, Emfuleni, Metsweding, Nokeng, City of Johannesburg, Midvaal, Randfontein, Westonaria and Merafeng.

In terms of the monitoring and evaluation strategy, the specific strategy for the program has been developed and implementation is in progress. Now the Ugu municipality was exposed to that training in April two years ago, and it was the first municipality to implement the program comprehensively, as a result of the training we believe that municipalities have aligned all their strategic programs and projects inline with the Batho Pele programme. Then we have a number of municipalities who are in the process of embracing the culture of Batho Pele, we'd like to see that across the country of course, and we've identified the municipalities in the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and the Northern Cape that is working on this.

By June of this year 20% of departments have submitted their strategic... their strategic development plans, but this is actually a drop from a compliance rate of 92% that we saw in the previous year. Again I should say we're quite early in the financial year because it's within the first three months of the financial year, but again it's not good enough because we need to ensure not only that we have compliance in terms of ticking off boxes, but that the strategic development plans are used in a very real sense to ensure that our planning cycles factor in what comes through those plans.

In terms of the Know Your Service Rights Campaign, the booklets for the social cluster has been translated in all 11 of our official languages, and 9 000 of these copies have been distributed to provincial officers and 18 000 to municipalities. I'm sure that they've also taken into account the Thusong Centres and we'll ensure that the community development workers also have access to these booklets. There will be the production of a DVD and a printing of additional copies.

The Department of Provincial and Local Government hosted a conference on multilingualism and capacity building in Cape Town in June this year, and the objectives of this conference was to build capacity for language facilitation in local government and then to propose guideline for implementing multilingualism in local government. A very positive push because you may recall that something like five years ago we had encouraged that in and across the public service, public servants at least speak a minimum of two languages particularly the provincially dominant language in order to be able to assist the public in a language that they use and this is very clearly something that we need to take forward at the public service level, and we really want to laud local government for taking that forward.

There's also been the launch of a national capacity building framework as a capacity coordination mechanism in support of the implementation of the five year local government strategic plan, and then of course there's also been a sharing of lessons on dealing with attacks on foreign nationals and to discuss the acceleration of community based programs in provinces and municipalities.

There has been a National Disaster Management Centre that's working together with provincial centres in order to coordinate government's program on the recent attacks on foreign nationals and we've seen once the inter-ministerial committee had been set up and the interdepartmental structures were put in place, there was quite a speedy response to deal with those instances... incidents in communities.

We will also have a day of commemoration on Thursday, this forthcoming Thursday, where we would call on South Africans to join in condemning what has taken place and also to ensure that as a government and as citizens of this country we address the problem and ensure that we address it systemically within society and... in order to build social cohesion, civil consciousness and peaceful coexistence as reflected in our Constitution. The details of this, that I would want to add to, are two. One, that there is a special technical President's coordinating council working session that was convened on the 27th of May. We also discussed this matter in great detail at the PCC that took place on the 13th of June and I just want to remind everyone that there is a SMS number to which people could send an SMS against which five rands will be deducted and that number is 36282.

In terms of the five year local government strategic agenda, 164 municipalities had been receiving hands on support as from April this year. This is an increase of 56 municipalities since the last reporting period and it's related to deployments made with a particular focus on the bucket eradication programme. National sector departments, namely provincial and local government, National Treasury, Water and Forestry, indeed has mobilised 626 technical experts in support of municipalities. We also have 503 financial management interns that are supported by National Treasury through a financial management grant. And this allows those interns to have an exposure to the municipal environment and in most instances they are being absorbed by the local government sector on an ongoing basis. DWAF has also dedicated 51 technical experts to focus on water related services, particularly in the Free State province. And they are assisting municipalities and the province to deal with challenges peculiar to the Free State.

On donor agencies, professional association and the private sector, they've collectively deployed 494 technical experts, including 133 young professionals and this has been through the Siyenza Manje Programme. I got it right, DG? Okay. These young professionals have engineering qualifications but limited experience, and they've been deployed in municipalities in order to build up that experience. Because if we really want to talk about mobilising and building the capacity required for our country then we need to ensure that we make the kind of investment that we are seeing through this programme.

We've seen a total of 1 120 deployments made in 200 municipalities and this is in an effort to eradicate infrastructure backlogs in municipalities. On the skills audit for local government we've seen 25% of the 283 municipalities having completed generic competency assessments for he section 57 and municipal managers. So it's the section 57 managers and the other municipal managers.

It's very clearly a push that we'd want to increase tremendously. It's part of the quantum leap we need to take. We've seen 5.3% out of 283 municipalities completing the skills audit questionnaires for employees below the managerial level. Two draft reports that were based on analysis of the generic competency assessment that was conducted for the management in 18 municipalities and so forth have been developed. The purpose of the skills audit report is to capture competency gaps found in municipalities and to assist national and provincial government to address skills development priorities through the strategic interventions.

We've also seen the implementation of the performance management systems in municipalities. And that's shown consistent improvement with a number of municipalities implementing these performance management systems, and we've seen an increase from 105 to 153 municipalities complying out of the 283. And this improvement has been since our last report. We've also seen the development of performance management system implementation support strategy to accelerate the process, and this has increased from 9.5% in 2006 to 38% by the end of March this year. This follows the nationwide assessment of the municipal performance management system implementation that was conducted in 2006 by the Department of Provincial and Local Government.

There's also a proposed set of core performance indicators for local government that has been developed, and there's been consultation with key stakeholders and these include national departments, six out of the nine provinces and so on. There's also a national program of support for the Institution of Traditional Leadership, and there will be a comprehensive skills development program for traditional leadership, and this has been developed by the department in partnership with the local government sector education and training authority. And they're training... will train traditional leaders on integrated development plans and then of course the community development workers.

On the government-wide national support program for traditional leaders, that will be submitted to Cabinet for approval. We've seen 76% of traditional council and 58% of local houses established, and then of course there's a policy document on the Khoisan traditional communities developed in consultation with the National Khoisan Council and traditional communities. I just want to emphasise that I didn't put that in there. That came from the department. So it shouldn't be reflected as a bias of any sort either geographically or otherwise. On the traditional leaders and governance framework amendment bill, this was published for comment on the 3rd of June and it looks at refining the legislative framework governing the institution of traditional leadership, looking at enhancing the efficacy of the houses and so on.

On the draft human resource planning strategic framework and this is in our skills assessment, this was presented at a KwaZulu-Natal human resource planning forum for consultation, and the intention is to create an integrated strategic approach to HR planning. And DPSA has established a provincial human resource planning committee or fora throughout for capacity development and coordination. And the aim is to develop competent and independent capacity in provinces. Emerging out of these fora was the need to meet with the heads of department in each of the province, and this has started since April this year, to workshop HR planning, and to leverage and institutionalise and to elevate it to a strategic level.

You would recall that we had a few years ago discussed this matter and the fact that we felt that the HR function in government was at too low a level, and that this created problems with compliance. And this particular initiative is to ensure that we take it forward in quite a comprehensive way. We've also had workshops on job profiling and capacity building, and we are... we've scheduled this from the 10th of June up to the end of September this year, and 22nd... 22 participating departments in the HR Connect Project has been invited to all workshops. There's just more detail on HRD, but seeing that most of you in the media aren't concerned about it, your working conditions are fine, your skills capacity is excellent, your benefit base is good, recruitment is great, you don't need though these details. But we are willing to get you to join our workshops if you want any further information on the detail.

On the capacity development programs, we have developed a minimum anti-corruption capacity manual, and I recall being asked a question about hwy minimum and so on in the last briefing. Richard Levine gave an explanation on that one at the time, but that has been done. We're also reviewing a gender mainstreaming draft manual that had been completed by curriculum experts and this has been for the benefit... this is being done by SAMDI. And there's also a national disability policy framework and we've dealt with that, and I must say that on the massified induction programme we've seen 500 trainers complete the trainer program. There's also been regional train the trainer sessions that are scheduled for this month and next, and I think one announcement that's quite important today is the fact that since the first of April this year we've seen 1 007 new public servants going through the induction training course, and there is separately from that there's a revised architecture of the accelerated development program that's being finalised and this relates to mentoring and coaching and project Khaedu work.

On the Public Administration Management Bill I've previously reported on the number of submissions received. I think what is new is that the bill has been certified and tagged as a section 76 bill, and it has been referred to the portfolio committee on public service and administration in the National Assembly.

On integrated service delivery, the Department of Home Affairs has established centres of excellence for refugee affairs, and they reviewed the capacity at four asylum seeker centres. 191 posts were established. There's been refurbishment of the refugee centres in Pretoria and Johannesburg, is underway at present. And there is a new integrated refugee system known as the refugee and deportation system that has been rolled out in all five refugee centres. Now this is a biometric system, and meant to ensure that asylum seekers are speedily processed.

A further point on integrated service delivery, and this relates to ICTs, our next generation e-government initiative has been launched. It will enable six frequently used government services such as child birth registration, ID applications, foster grants, pension and maintenance orders and all to be completed as well as death notification. The tender for this project has closed yesterday. And the work will roll out once the tender has been has been granted or awarded, ja. The ICT blueprint for the Thusong Centre has been developed and you'd recall the launch of the 100th centre was done by the president on the 7th of June in Inhlazuka.

In terms of integration of planning, here one would want to indicate that the IDP analysis sessions were held in all provinces in April and May this year, and they were evaluated and the suggestions for improvement were recorded, there's also a Winter School that was opened to planners from municipalities that had poor IDPs, and this will be done this month at the University of Pretoria. The sector education and training authority has accredited the courses, and the non-accredited courses will form the curriculum including sustainable development, land use management, spatial development frameworks, and project management and so on. There is a partnership with the South African Planning Institute that has been established on a mentoring program for municipal planners on development administration. It's also an important issue because that's something that we've not been very good on, it's sustaining putting in place and sustaining a mentorship and coaching programme. Thank you very much.

Chairperson: Thank you very much, Minister. We'll now take questions. We'll start with Pretoria, take three questions and then take three questions from Cape Town. Remember we have a full panel, so not all questions need to be referred to the minister alone. Shall we start with Pretoria? Pretoria seems to be still a bit sleepy. Shall we start with Cape Town then?

Journalist: Minister, just two questions if I can. Over the last ten years, what is government's perception of the trend in corruption and its extent within government and the perception is that there's a very high level of corruption, particularly coming after the decision by Amazon not to use the Post Office for example. If you could comment broadly about that and also, there have been reports about the flight of D-G's and top government officials ahead of next year's elections and the transition. Are there any mechanisms in place to retain skills? Is it true that there's this flight? If you can comment on the planning for that transition?

Journalist: Just one question. The Public Service Commission, a report that they list here, is that government departments are still employing without checking the qualifications of people who join the Public Service and that people who are within the Public Service, a lot of employees are still reluctant to submit their qualifications for verification. Are you worried about that and what is your department doing to ensure that government departments don't do this and they comply?

Minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi: We tried very hard to emphasise on my competent team here, and everyone avoided them. Firstly, I want to go back on the whole focus on corruption and our anti-corruption focus. I'm making a reference and I don't have the exact quote now, to a point made by one of the directors of the World Bank, and this is a Nigerian who had actually said that as we take forward the whole focus and thrust on anti-corruption, the one big thing we should take into account, is the fact that we don't only and shouldn't only look at the numbers, but also look at whether we are putting the right frameworks in place. Are we building the capacity required, are the institutional mechanisms there to deal with corruption.

I want to say that I am quite confident that when we look at our legislation - and our legislation is quite far-reaching, we have sound legislation. We have good frameworks within the public service. For us, it's about the application. So in that regard, I'd say we are well on our way to deal with the combating of corruption in a comprehensive and co-ordinated manner. Yes, there will be ongoing perceptions of corruption, and you did emphasise the point that there are perceptions, and we know that perception is quite strong and can be all-pervasive, and there's going to be a need for us to deal with that. That is precisely why, for the Anti-Corruption Summit that takes place on the 4th - 5th August, that's why we are looking at putting in place a National Integrity System. So I think that probably, you should pursue this question during that summit. Also, arising from the deliberations from the summit, I think it will be an opportunity to get a more comprehensive overview on the kinds of issues you raised. We will ensure that the media, much as I know that SANEF is represented on the forum, but that we extend invitations to the various news rooms in order to ensure participation there.

The second issue is on the flight of DG's. I had just spoken about vacancies of D-G's earlier, and I indicated that there are three vacancies at the national level and one at the provincial level. And you should bear in mind that in this period we've also seen the renewal of contracts of DG's, one of whom is sitting on my left here, the D-G of Provincial and Local Government. So, very clearly, we have not seen this flight that is being spoken about. What I have said previously, and I will say repeatedly, is that a general election is a necessary part of the political life of every sound democracy and we should ensure that we guard that. And we have regular general elections and I'm confident that we'll be going into the future. It's also necessary to state that the public service should never be destabilised by general elections or consider themselves destabilised or get involved in actions that they may suggest is because of a general election. If any public servant does that, they're very clearly not taking into account the code of conduct in the public service; they are not looking at the constitution, as well as looking very closely at chapter ten of the constitution, that very clearly spells out the values and principles that governs the public service. So if there's an institution that should, and must be stable during general elections and with the transition, that is the public service. Now, let me take this further and say that of course, your directors-general are on contact positions, but South Africa - unlike the United States of America - does not have directors-general as political appointments. The only political appointments in the public service are the advisors. Their tenure is linked to the term of office of the minister, or a premier or the president or deputy president. So if as minister I am fired tomorrow, the advisor leaves tomorrow. The difference between my firing and the advisor is there's a provision of one month's salary for the advisor. So if anybody is in an insecure position, that would be advisors, but they very clearly make the choice to come in to those positions. With DG's again, they a serve their term or they can resign. But they must not use politics as reasons or excuses for taking particular decisions.

Then, on the point you've raised around the report from the Public Service Commission, and I do want to say that the Public Service Commission did two reports. They did one of the verification of qualifications of the senior management service. You know that we've spoken about that previously and that verification also gave us a sense of the levels of academic qualifications prevalent in the senior management service. And for most, if I can remind you once again, there's a minimum of two degrees with SMS members. On the issue of the middle management, the MMS, here we've seen that 64% of departments had only done qualification verification; post the appointment of the public servants into positions. Now this we've clearly stated is not the ideal situation and we'd want to have the situation that before the appointment, qualification verifications would be done. We very clearly welcome the report done by the Public Service Commission, because they're complying with their constitutional mandate of actually overseeing the performance of the public service and I think it makes my job easier as Minister for Public Service. So we will pursue this in order to ensure that all Heads of Department, through the supervisory structures within their departments, ensure that the verification processes are complied with as required. The issue of reluctance to submit, this is not a choice. It's a requirement, and we will ensure that there is compliance with that. Thank you.

Journalist: The percentage of women has grown by only two percenet. What is the department doing to encourage more women to apply first of all, and then to basically force the managers to employ more women? You're looking at a target of 50% and we're standing at 34%, if I'm correct?

Journalist: On these refugee facilities, we're not allowed to call them camps, what is the long-term plan for those? I know the president has spoken and yesterday they spoke of re-introducing them back into communities. Is that process taking place and do we have a time period? And then, have we noticed any flowing-back of people who fled the country when the xenophobic attacks occurred? Have we seen that there is a return of that process, of people coming back into the country?

Mr. Jackson McKay (acting DG Home Affairs): The issue of the shelters, what we call the temporary shelters. The plan is to re-integrate those people that have been displaced, that are staying there, at the end of July. In August the process of re-integration into the communities should have begun. We are busy with a registration process now, where these people are being handed, the undocumented foreigners are being given an exemption certificate that will allow them to regularise their stay in the country in the next six months. And those that have documentation and that have lost it, they will be re-issued. But the process is to have them re-integrated into the communities where they were displaced. That should start by July/August. With regard to the persons coming back into the country, most of the people who left were undocumented and did not come through a border post in the first place. They came through the border fence or anywhere else, but not a border post. What happened were those that had left, and had voluntarily returned, we had registered them and we have the names of those that went back. We have not seen any or noticed any of them returning to South Africa.

Minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi: As Jack is saying, if they jump the fence, they don't register so we wouldn't know. On the more serious and challenging question - I'm not suggesting yours wasn't serious - challenging question on gender, you will see in the media brief that we are going to engage with government departments to look at the challenges that are encountered in achieving the 50% target. And in so doing we want to see what we can do that is quite extraordinary to ensure the push required for us to meet the 50% target in 2009. The details thereof I think we can deal with once that consultation have taken place. I had said at the previous media briefing, because I actually communicated my concern and disquiet at that point already, that there are a number of factors that have come up, and this includes amongst others, especially at the level of D-G, where we've actually seen in many departments the change of demographics amidst DDG's. My own department, the women outnumber the men by far, quite to my great pleasure, if I can say that. But at D-G level, part of the issue is the demands that such a position places on women, especially those who are parenting. I'm not suggesting that the males don't take their parenting responsibilities at heart completely, but there are a number of challenges and we are looking at this quite closely. We have also as I indicated earlier, we had the Service Delivery Improvement Plans programme, that was a programme targeted at women, young women, to look at their overall capacity, development and fast-tracking through the senior management, into the senior management service. We've renamed that programme, the Accelerated Development Programme. One challenge we had when we started that programme was, we had great difficulty to get departments to submit names of women for that programme, and there are some officials who are sitting here who will remain nameless, who will remember that is was quite an uphill battle to ensure that women are included. So yes, there is an element of, you use the word 'force', encouragement required in order to ensure that we do make the changes required and ensure that we encourage women to actually apply for senior management service positions. Thanks.

Journalist: Minister, government is going to create a special department in the public service for traditional leadership. Why are you doing this when the trend worldwide is to phase them out?

Minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi: Wyndham, has the monarchy been abolished in the UK? I missed that one. I know they may not have a specific department but you should just exchange the literature with me. I'd appreciate that. But I think Lindy wants to answer.

Lindiwe Msengana-Ndlela, Director General of Department of Provincial and Local Government: Thank you. Yes, the government has announced that there will be a new Department of Traditional Leadership Affairs and this department will start its operations in the oncoming financial year 2009/2010. The most important approach to this is to focus on the needs of traditional communities. Why do we need to ensure that the traditional communities especially in rural areas are able to receive services and also receive co-ordinated support from all of the departments with regard to infrastructure development, with regard to potential economic development programmes? So it was seen fit to introduce a new department that will have the capacity to focus on this matter entirely, as well as to work with the institution of traditional leadership. Thank you.

Chairperson: Thanks very much Minister and the Directors General.