08 May 2018

Minister of Land Management, Water and Sanitation Services, Mr Kefentse Mzwinila has hailed his staff workers for good service delivery.

Giving a keynote address  during the ministry’s excellence awards ceremony, Mr Mzwinila applauded the awardees for the good service they continued to deliver at their respective duty stations.

He thanked and recognised all members of their establishment who could not make the cut for this year’s awards, urging them to hold steadfast and keep working hard so that they could tell different story in 2019.

Minister Mzwinila said the ministry’s guiding tool was the 2017 – 2023 Strategic Plan, which had been crafted deliberately to align with NDP 11 and National Vision 2036.

“It is our hope that its implementation will facilitate our capacity to meaningfully deliver on our national development priorities,” he noted.

Furthermore, he said the core of the strategy was driven by an overarching theme, which emphasised on their mandate of proper land administration and management to facilitate socio-economic development through land servicing.

Mr Mzwinila also noted that one of the driving values they adopted in their overall strategy was the value of Customer First.

“We must make it our duty to elevate our customer to the highest regard of honour at all times as we exist to serve them,” he said.

He further implored all employees to embody the value and make it their second nature as they go about their public service.
Mr Mzwinila said the ministry had witnessed unprecedented developments in the fronts of both land and water administration and management, noting they successfully pushed through two major amendments to Tribal Land Act and the Deeds Registry Act during the last Parliament session.
He explained that the amendments aimed at optimising land resource administration and management to ensure proper documentation of allocated land.
He said that would enable legal recognition of secure land title and digital transactions by the Registrar of Deeds.

The minister was hopeful that the project would serve well in the reduction and eventual elimination of cases of land mismanagement and other unethical practices that had threatened their integrity over the past few years.

Mr Mzwinila noted that Parliament had authorised them to obtain a loan facility from the World Bank to specifically address the emergency water challenges facing the country.

The loan, he said would augment the budgetary efforts to integrate and manage both the surface and ground water resources situation in the country.

He noted that the funds would help build water supply systems which would benefit at least 460 000 people in selected locations. It will also help connect at least 177 000 people to improved wastewater treatment systems.

He said they had planned to develop the water supply and wastewater management infrastructure and strengthen the institutional capacity to enable them to manage better this vital resource.

He said at the end, they must be able to realise proper upgrades on water supply infrastructure and adequate policies to address the existing and emerging water-related issues.

Moreover, he acknowledged that they had their own internal challenges regarding staffing, aging infrastructure and obsolete technologies in some of the water supply schemes.

However, he suggested that they up their game with respect to the public relations and information sharing especially in the rural areas to stop clients from forming false opinions about them.

Minister Mzwinila further shared that the National Land Registration exercise was progressing well as they had recorded about 718 672 land parcels which had been registered and surveyed thus far. Ends