12 Jul 2020

 It is a duty of every leader to ensure that public money is used as planned and projects are delivered to the communities as approved by the council. 

Addressing councillors as they embarked on a two-day tour of ongoing developmental projects around the city last week, mayor of Gaborone City, Mr Father Maphogo said councillors had the right to know and appreciate the challenges encountered by contractors engaged by the council.

Mr Maphongo said the city council found it fit to take councillors on a developmental project tour so that when full council resumed they would be in a position to come up with solutions towards addressing challenges faced by contractors and see how best they could be addressed.

The tour leader, Ms Motamma Horatius, who is the chairperson of the finance committee and performance and monitoring committee chairperson, said the main purpose of the tour was for councillors to have firsthand information rather than receive progress reports from officials.

    She said the site visits would help them to see if the project status correlated with what was on paper and also to ensure that all the projects were executed on time and within budget.

   Ms Horatius said they also wanted to enlighten councillors that the ongoing projects were funded from different votes, stating that some projects were funded by the constituency funds, others from Economic Stimulus Programme (ESP) while others were financed from the council recurrent budget.

   She said the tour would also assist councillors to have in-depth knowledge of every project on the ground as their mandate was to be solution-oriented in order to contribute to service delivery to the communities they were representing.

Regarding challenges, Ms Horatius said they sometimes encountered delays in connecting water and electricity and said the issue was being attended to with the two corporations’ (BPC and WUC) officials.

She said vandalism and theft of electrical cables or materials were also of great concern and usually caused delays on completion of projects.

He, therefore, appealed to Batswana to always put an eye on projects as they were mainly built for them.

The first project to be visited was Maruapula Clinic, the community hall and kgotla shelter, which were constructed through the constituency fund.

The clinic, which is almost complete, was constructed at a cost of P9 million, which include the equipment and the ambulance.

Area councillor, Mr Jenamiso Mathalaza expressed gratitude towards the council for ensuring that projects were completed on time and within budget.

   Mr Mathalaza said the clinic would play a pivotal role in the healthcare of the residents of Maruapula, more especially during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic.

She said the decision was taken by the community themselves to have a clinic, community hall and the kgotla shelter as they had been struggling during meetings.

Another project that was toured was the paving and the construction of the storm water drainage in the White City and Gaborone West locations, where councillors complained that they were not properly consulted  when the project started.

    Councillor for Morula ward, Ms Khukhi Moremi complained that the contractor had brought workers from outside the ward, which move denied residents of the location the opportunity to benefit from that project as was the initial plan.

   Tlogatloga councillor, Mr Arthur Tabane appealed to the council to sure that projects undertaken in their wards benefitted the communities living in those areas. 

His appeal came when the councillors were touring the Block Five park, where a borehole had been drilled.

   He said as custodians of the park, the residents of the location were supposed to be the first beneficiaries, as such they had plans regarding the use of the water from the borehole.

He also said that the community was planning to have some sport  courts and a football pitch in the park for leisure. Ends