14 Mar 2018

Kweneng Land Board is reportedly owed over P13 million resulting from unpaid lease rentals.

Officially opening the Kweneng council meeting this week, council chairperson, Mr Jeffrey Sibisibi said out of the specified amount, the land board had been able to recover P902 888 as at December 2017.

He called on councillors to take the issue seriously by encouraging the electorate to honour their obligations by ensuring payments as per the agreement.  

The other disturbing factor according to Mr Sibisibi is that out of 436 allocated plots during the 2017/2018, only 103 were developed.

On other issues, the council chairperson reported a disturbing trend of illegal change of use of   project boreholes into livestock watering  boreholes.

He warned that project boreholes were used for irrigation purposes and he called on the leadership to interact with concerned individuals and discourage them against the practice.

“Change of use of project boreholes to livestock boreholes is not only a breach of agreement with the land board, but also poses an environmental risk as the land is left degraded from over grazing and over stocking.”

Regarding the issue of plot numbering,  Kweneng Land Board is reported to be doing well starting with Lephepe and Motokwe Sub Land Boards while other land boards were still awaiting supply of numbers.

On a different note, the council chairperson raised concern over the issue of overcrowding in Mogoditshane schools leading to high enrolment influenced by its close proximity to the capital city.

“The high enrolment at Mogoditshane needs urgent attention in the form of a new junior secondary school,” said the council chairperson.

The problem,  he said, had a far reaching impact on academic performance looking at the fact that Tau Manthe and Nkoyaphiri primary schools have seven and nine outside teaching classrooms respectively, saying the situation required a fully fledged school with 22 classrooms.  

He said the high increase of learners from junior schools to Mogoditshane Senior Secondary School had affected the quality of education and led to declining results.He also briefed the council about the education strategy aimed to reduce the number of learners accessing senior schools to 3 600 admissions to Form IV in the current year as opposed to the previous year’s  4 000.

He said the strategy was expected to yield better results, as the remaining numbers were enrolled at brigades and technical institutions.

Mr Sibisibi had also reported an increasing number of school dropouts in the Kweneng region resulting from various reasons such as truancy, pregnancy, ill health and deaths together with 571 cases of desertion.

“I further appeal to the community to be observant and start acting as our society’s ethics and morals is rapidly eroding,” he noted.

He said in order to ensure consistent and adequate supply of food commodities in primary schools, there would be a weekly stock check on commodities.

He said the decision was aimed to monitor supply of food commodities to avoid excess supply leading to losses due to re-distribution of food items. Ends