Well, maybe you must give me one example where Home Affairs got hacked and somebody stole that system. I can assure you that we are trying our best but we are not denying the fact that there is fraud, corruption and that our own officials can practise those. We are not running away from that but
I can assure you to the best of my knowledge and ability that up to so far since we have started the smart ID system nobody has been able to defraud or forge it. It has not been possible. In fact, last week I hosted the Minister of Home Affairs in Namibia to go and see our systems because they are thinking about us printing ultra security documents for them. He saw the system and said see for yourselves if you feel very safe but the issue, I think you are aware is a worldwide thing. Even highly sophisticated nations like Great Britain and the UK do get hacked at some stage or the other. So it will not be something that is new but I can assure we are safe.
Up to so far Chairperson, we have got backups, archives in Home Affairs where we have stored 287 million documents stretch from 1895. They are there and we can show you who got married in 1895. Unfortunately, because of our history, the 1895 would be for whites only. We came later but we do have those documents. As I am standing here, we are digitalising them and we have already digitalised five million of them because those documents are getting very old. If you want to know whether your father got married in 1960 to whom and in what church, you can come we will show you that information. We have got it. It might not work for me because we only came after 1994 but for you I am sure it is there because it is stored in our archives.
If you check that our population is 57 million and the documents we have are 287 million. It is five times the size of our population which we are keeping in archives in the form of papers. We can give them to you in the short space of time. Just to show you how secure they are.
A gentleman came in early this year to take an ID and he says he is a South African and we took the fingerprints and check everything. We went to our archives and brought his fingerprints which were taken when he came into South Africa from Lesotho in 1981 to come and work in the mines. We showed him that the story that he is a South African is not true. These are the fingerprints which he took in the mines in 1981 and this is the same fingerprints that we are taking now. So he is not the one he was saying he is. We are able to get it through our archives.
So, while cyber crime is dangerous please do not undermine us. We know some things.
Xitsonga: