03 Mar 2020

Chairperson of Kgatleng Land Board has appealed to the incoming board members to familiarise themselves with President Dr Mokgweetsi Masisi’s transformational agenda.

Addressing the last meeting of the board for the quarter before a new board is selected, Ms Margret Mabua said it was pertinent for new board members to be in sync with what the political leadership of the day wanted to achieve.

She said her hope was for the new board to move forward the mandate of Kgatleng Land Board and thanked the current members for supporting her and making her job easier.

Ms Mabua said it had been three years since they took office and still they had failed as the board to collect debts owed to them.

She further said the district as a whole was in need of an updated and functional integrated land use plan.

“The current plan is outdated and hardly in consent with expectations of the public at large and is further complicated by the fact that the tool is not gazette,” she said.

The board has decided that this anomaly should henceforth be rectified, she continued.

Ms Mabua said while funding continued to be a challenge, a decision had been made that the plan would be reviewed in-house, in conjunction with the department of town and country planning.

She noted that even though the board continued to allocate land to Batswana, plots allocated remained undeveloped, both residential and commercial.

Ms Mabua further said the board was continuing with the exercise of land registration, which started in 2014 and they were working hard to complete the project so as to facilitate the land information system.

She announced that Kgatleng Land Board had been nominated to be one of the first to issue the secured land title.

“Recently, our parent ministry undertook end to end testing of the land information system and it was a success.

It is now a matter of how ready we are as an establishment to issue titles,” said Ms Mabua.

She further said another key issue was land board policies, which appeared to be in conflict with the national land policy and other legislation, but were not standard across the establishments.

Ms Mabua said the idea was to standardise these and a task team had been appointed to spearhead the process, which was to start the exercise in the near future.

She indicated that their mandate was to manage land for the socio-economic benefit of Botswana and this was their guiding principle in that regard.

For her part, Kgatleng Land Board secretary, Ms Tlotlego Rampa informed members that they recently had a meeting with Minister of Land Management, Water and Sanitation Services and they discussed various issues regarding the land information system.

She said even though Kgatleng Land Board was one of the land boards identified to pilot the system, they had a challenge of not having a lawyer, save for only one land conveyer and no internet.

“There has been no internet in our offices for the past two weeks and these are some of the issues we discussed with relevant authorities to see what could be done, because for the land information system pilot to be a success we need them,” she said.

Mr Mogatusi Kwapa, who is a board member, urged the board to train and capacitate members on time so they could execute their duties diligently.

“Take for example the training on adjudication of tenders, we were only trained recently when our term is coming to an end,” he said. ENDS