NELSPRUIT – The Public Protector (PP) presented her office’s report on the public hearings held in Mpumalanga to legislature on Thursday morning.
Adv Thuli Madonsela said the voices and views report were not finger pointing. “We believe that 95 per cent of the things we saw can be fixed without investigation, and that is why we are bringing them to your attention,” she said.
The report focussed on aspects of the millennium-development goals, one of which was reducing poverty by 50 per cent from 2000 to 2015. “My sense is that we will not,” she said, indicating that the population living below the poverty line have increased to 52 per cent.
Statistics put Mpumalanga’s population in poverty at 67 per cent, the third highest of all the provinces. In pointing out what they had found about the impact of maladministration on poverty, RDP houses remained a big issue.
Last year, Madonsela requested the premier and MEC for human settlements to compile an action plan to address the housing crisis. “There are still problems, but now it is a question of extent,” she said. “There are still the same problems, but their magnitude has been reduced. The only thing is that we don’t want to see new ones.”
“The reality is that there are still people without houses and in Carolina (which they visited Wednesday) we asked the mayor to devise a plan to tell people when they will get houses.” The PP said people were calmer about getting houses when they understood the process and had an indication of how long to still wait for it.
According to Madonsela, shortages of staff and clinics remained a huge issue. She said that the office of the premier, Mr David Mabuza, and hers had arrived at the same conclusion surrounding it. “Where government is found to be doing something to address an issue, we will not investigate,” she explained.
She said she was also aware of the ongoing investigation by the human rights commission into aspects of health departments, including Mpumalanga’s. “We only investigate those issues not being addressed by anyone else and we share our findings with everyone involved.”
