09 Dec 2014

Employees of the Ministry of Lands and Housing have been urged to work hard to take their ministry to greater heights.

Speaking during the sixth leadership forum of the Ministry of Lands and Housing (MLH) in Mahalapye recently, the permanent secretary, Mr Thato Raphaka urged attendees to work hard to terminate any challenges they had. 

Mr Raphaka said there were challenges within the ministry but stressed that they should be resolved if the ministry was to be taken to greater heights. He said it was troubling to hear ordinary people talking of corruption about land boards on a daily basis, adding that the time had come to get rid of that concept from their customers.

Nevertheless, Mr Raphaka said, over the years, the MLH had witnessed a number of successful developments such as the strategic development plans and completion of design infrastructure projects in land servicing. He applauded the employees for that, but said a number of challenges were crippling the ministry’s efforts such as illegal land occupation in some places.

Mr Raphaka stated that there was still failure to enforce developments covenants leading to undeveloped land as well as lack of systematic approaches to dealing with the waiting list and shortage of serviced land especially in major settlements to mention a few.

He pointed out that the country was coming from a very critical time of elections saying land issues had been topical during campaigns. He said now was the time for such issues to be addressed so Batswana would not strive for land. He pointed out that issues of land and housing had been troubling Batswana; as such the forum was a good opportunity to come up with best solutions.

He said the fact that people still got swamped whenever they were called to apply for land needed to be addressed, adding that it showed that there was a crisis within the ministry that needed to be dealt with. He gave an example of the recent scramble that occurred at Oodi Land Board saying such incident needed to be dealt with within the ministry as it is proof of the demand for land.

Mr Paphaka also said access to housing still remained a challenge because there was a 25 percent of decent housing demand countrywide.  He therefore urged attendees to come up with a number of laws to make it easier to acquire land and how well to assist the communities they work within. For his part, the motivational speaker of the day Mr Moshe Seloko advised the attendees to think outside the box.

Mr Seloko said the ministry had a challenge that though land was not increasing, the number of people in the country was increasing and soon they were going to be in need of land. He said even if the land was not increasing leaders in the ministry could come up with solutions to be able to provide land. ENDS