Mayor is grilled about services

BURGERSFORT – The National Council of Provinces (NCOP) grilled the Greater Tubatse Municipality’s (GTM) mayor,Cllr Ralepane Mamekoa and his team during its visit to the municipality’s chamber on July 23.

“Mayor, your report does not have a good story to tell,” the representative from parliament, Ms Lesailane Mampuru told Mamekoa.

The visitors were also disappointed to see only 19 of the 62 councillors present at the meeting.

“It shows that the councillors don’t care about the plight of their communities, we are here to discuss issues affecting their wards but they are nowhere to be found,” said Mampuru.

The team reiterated to the mayor, that there was no excuse for failure to provide services to the people of Tubatse.

“Twenty-one years after democracy, people are still suffering, Mamekoa we are fully resourced, no excuses, your municipality is turning a good story into an ugly one,” they said.

In his attempts to defend GTM, the mayor highlighted that Tubatse was a mountainous area and therefore it was costly to provide services to the people.

“Areas like Mafarafara are mountainous; we need a lot of funds to ensure they get proper services.We also have a low number of people who went to tertiary institutions, our stats reveal that only six per cent went.”

Mamekoa put the blame on mining companies as he claimed they were not addressing the community’s needs such as roads and infrastructure in their social-labour plans.

“We are engaging mining companies in terms of skills development; hopefully this will help in resolving our crisis.”

The mayor revealed that GTM also struggled to perform immensely because it had had a period of more than a year without a permanent municipal manager (MM) and also a chief financial officer.

The NCOP team advised the mayor to ensure there were no factions in the municipality, They also advised the new MM, Mr Johannes Mohlala to prepare himself thoroughly when legislature visited his municipality.