Acting North West Premier Nono Maloyi has made a new commitment to speed up service delivery in the province.
Maloyi launched Thuntsha Lerole, on Friday in Ipelegeng township outside Schweizer Reneke, a project aimed at accelerating the provision of essential services to the communities.
“It is critical that we change the way we do things; on many occasions, we are simply talking but not providing services to the people. I want to expedite this and bring services to the people,” Maloyi told Ipelegeng residents.
Maloyi said his office opted for the name Thuntsha Lerole to reflect the government’s increased commitment to supply services and that Fridays will be used by municipality and government officials to attend to the problems faced by the residents.
“We have declared the North West Province a construction site. This means that starting from today and every Friday, we expect every municipality to be hard at work attending to issues of service delivery.”
Maloyi and several members of the Executive team started by fixing potholes, repairing broken street lights, bringing refrigerators to five schools to help with school nutrition programmes, supplying dustbins to 50 residents, and issuing title deeds.
“Your municipality is struggling; it has challenges, and it requires intervention. We have asked Finance MEC Motlalepule Rosho to go there and identify the types of problems the municipality is facing so that the municipality can administratively run things properly..
“We understand that you have 27 boreholes and only 15 are functional, and those that are not working are the ones that have a lot of water. We have tasked the district mayor to go and attend to those boreholes as soon as tomorrow,” he said.
Residents expressed hope and said they were pleased because Maloyi addressed concerns that had been plaguing them for years including a high rate of unemployment in the area, which is causing young people to turn to crime.
A resident, Anna Moilakgaka, expressed her desire for the acting premier to reopen the operation of a mine in the area, saying it could create a lot of jobs.
“We don’t have street lights, and young people terrorise us at night, breaking into our homes on a daily basis. I believe if the government could reopen that mine, a lot of them would be hired, and crime would decrease,” she said.
While Selby Motshidisi, complained about sewage spills on the streets.and the dirt piling up because of the municipality’s failure to collect garbage.
“These are some of the concerning factors, and we deal with them on a daily basis. We hope that this government programme addresses all of that,” he said.
Maloyi said communities will be involved in efforts to find solutions for service delivery challenges through the programme.
