In a bid to resolve the non-payment of scholar transport operators in the North West, the Department of Community Safety and Transport Management has implemented several measures.
These include the establishment of a ‘War Room’ led by the Head of Department Dr Hans Kekana, disbursement of two payments per week and working closely with the Department of Education.
The department measures come after several operators downed tools recently, complaining about the non-payment of their services.
This resulted in some learners unable to attend classes, due to the unavailability of the buses.
“On the delay of payments, we had received 928 invoices and to date 552 have been processed.
We experienced a system failure which affected processing of these payments.
As a result, we have requested the Treasury to allow us to disburse two payments per week instead of one.
We are now disbursing payments on Tuesdays and Fridays,” said the department MEC Wessels Morweng during a media briefing in Mahikeng.
In addition, the MEC highlighted that the department held two meetings with operators to explain their challenges and will continue to engage with them and ensure that the learners are not impacted.
Morweng acknowledged that one of the problems identified is the manual invoice system, which has turned out to be problematic and erroneous.
“As part of intervention to ensure that operators are paid within the stipulated 30-day period, we are implementing a system used by the national government called ‘Re a patala’.
It is an invoice tracking system that will assist us to quickly track and address areas where invoices get delayed.
One other problem with the manual system is that we are unable to see where there are delays in the value chain,” explained the MEC, adding that the new system will be monitored daily and will assist in expediting payments once invoices are captured.
Meanwhile, Morweng said several operators’ contracts have been terminated after following contraventions.
“When the current contract began, we had 446 operators and in the service level agreement (SLA) we had with them, there are compliance clauses which guide steps to be taken when there are contraventions.
The contravention as per the SLA include amongst others, unroadworthy buses, failure to transport learners and endangering the safety of the learners.
As we speak now, we had already terminated 90 operators for one or more of the of the contraventions mentioned above,” remarked Morweng.
The department, through its traffic officers, has established a dedicated team that will focus strictly on scholar transport, to ensure that operators that the buses are roadworthy.
