26 Mar 2014

The Mmathubudukwane community hall is to be turned into a service centre by next month as part of the decentralisation process.

When addressing the Kgatleng District full council on Monday, March 24, council chairperson, Mr Tona Mooketsi said one way in which service delivery could be improved was through decentralisation.

He said despite the prolonged process in decentralising some services, the council had managed to deploy a number of officers from four departments to the three service centres of Mmathubudukwane, Oodi and Artesia.

Mr Mooketsi said the four departments were social and community development, architecture and buildings, legal services and public health.

Councillor for Malolwane ward, Mr Stephen Makhura applauded the move, saying many people would be able to get services closer more especially that most of them were not working. He wished that Omang and revenue offices could be opened so that people would not travel distances to get service.

Mr Makhura further said the right people should be brought in who could make on the spot decisions to avoid red tapes. He added that this would help bring other services to the river villages especially that they were still awaiting a police station and hospital to be built in their area.

Mr Mooketsi said the preliminary recurrent budget for 2014/15 financial year was P168.3 million and the amount went down to P151.1 million. He said this meant that their running expenses declined from P39.9 million to P32.9 million representing a reduction of P7 million.

The council chairman further said this therefore meant a lot of things that were planned would not be done.

“These budgets cuts have affected and dwarfed our efforts to achieve our mandate of sustainable rural development because critical areas of the budget have been affected such as those votes which cater for replacement of vehicles, maintenance of infrastructure and council facilities, orphan-care and relief destitution persons to mention a few.”

Mr Mooketsi said the frequent breakdown of graders had seriously stalled the implementation of the annual grading plan. He said currently there was only one out of three graders working adding that many roads in the district were long overdue for grading. Ends