16 Mar 2022

Kweneng Land Board (KLB) has failed to meet its residential plot allocation target for this financial year.

Reflecting on the board’s performance at KLB’s last financial year meeting, the board chairperson Mr Kgang Kgang said Kweneng Land Board had an allocation target of 6 010 plots but only managed to allocate 750 plots or eight percent of the target.

He indicated that their set target was informed amongst others by the rate at which land “becomes available at the end of the land delivery process.”

He said out of the 750 allocated plots, Molepolole sub Land Board allocated 193 plots while Motokwe sub Land Board managed to allocate 149 plots. Lephepe and Thamaga allocated 134 and 120 plots respectively with Letlhakeng sub Land Board managing to allocate 34 and Lentsweletau allocating 26 plots.

Lengthy acquisition process and slow production of layout plans by the district council remained their main challenge and greatly contributed to poor performance.

Nonetheless, the board chairperson said that he was optimistic that the situation would improve since they were expecting a total of 675 residential plots, out of which 436 would be allocated to Gakgatla and 239 to Diphuduhudu before the end of this financial year.

Mr Kgang further opined that Kweneng Land Board was not doing well in the area of revenue collection.

He said they had planned to collect over P6 million but only managed to collect a little over P2 million.

He explained that the reason why their collection was low was because people were reluctant to pay for their leased land.

To mitigate they needed to aggressively come up with revenue collection strategies to augment government revenue support.

“It is very clear that government revenue support has been reduced therefore we have to increase our own revenue source by prioritising collection of lease arrears that we are currently owed,” he said.

On other issues, he said the land board was experiencing a great challenge of breach of development covenants.

The reason for breach of covenants, he said included among others lack of financial resources to develop plots by clients and unavailability of services such as water at areas that had been allocated.

Ms Daphney Champane, a board member said Kweneng Land Board continuously experienced a lot of challenges because of its proximity to Gaborone with areas such as Mogoditshane and Metsimotlhabe fingered as hot spots.

She also said that at times the Land Board was mandated to take back land occupied illegally by squatters and in such instances the land board should not be viewed in a bad light as there were certain processes and procedures to be followed as enshrined in the Tribal Land Act.

Mr David Mogorosi, also a member, said Batswana were ignorant of the laws and policies governing land allocation. He encouraged them to inform themselves on policies and procedures as that would help reduce overwhelming applications in land boards. ENDS