21 Jun 2017

Minister of Infrastructure and Housing Development, Mr Nonofho Molefhi says government has resolved to advise councils to only accept applications for Self-Help Housing Agency (SHHA) within budget.

Addressing the Central District Council on Tuesday, Minister Molefhi said by accepting applications that were within budget, councils would do away with unnecessary backlogs and stop raising unnecessary expectations from applicants.

Minister Molefhi noted that there were currently about five thousand people on the waiting list.

The minister also noted that councils received many applications for either turnkey projects or home improvement that overwhelmed the P80 million budgeted annual for projects.

Mr Molefhi informed CDC councillors that government needed P400 million to service the current applications whilst only P199 million has been repaid by beneficiaries.

He said in their endeavour to source funds to address the backlog, they recieved about P200 million and that they would not accept applications for the following year but would clear the waiting list.

In order to get funds into the SHHA coffers and get more Batswana benefitting from the programme, Mr Molefhi appealed to councillors to encourage their electorate to repay their interest free loans.

In the event that beneficiaries continued to snub calls to repay loans, the minister said councils should devise strategies to force them to service their loans.

He suggested that repossessing the houses and putting them under the custody of council could get beneficiaries to service their loans.

He said whilst the turnkey houses were budgeted at P90 000 per unit, government was alive to disparities in places such as Letlhakane, where accommodation was expensive. In fact, Mr Molefhi noted that Letlhakane was the most expensive village to provide accommodation in.

He said SHHA was faced with challenges of unavailability of plots in some areas, noting that in some instances, government considered sourcing land, servicing it and building SHHA houses and allocating them to Batswana.

However, he said the plan was discarded because some would-be beneficiaries wanted to be allocated plots in their wards so that they could live amongst their relatives.

The minister also told CDC councillors that some ministries and departments had requested them to build them houses, but had not come forth to claim them despite having received communication to that effect. He warned that such houses would be sold to departments that expressed interest. BOPA