BLOUBERG mayor, Serite Sekgoloane and other executive members visited Giyani last Wednesday to see how Muyexe village was developed in order to implement similar projects in their municipality.
According to Sekgoloane, their visit was driven by a need to do some benchmarking in order to come up with the best strategy to implement poverty alleviation projects in their municipality.
“On his visit to our municipality recently, the minister of rural development suggested that we visit Muyexe to see how things are done there in order for us to learn a few things about establishing projects that improve the lives of our communities,” he explained.
Asked if they intended to use the ideas they learned in Muyexe on a specific project, Sekgoloane said they aimed to extend the development in Muyexe to Ha-Kgatla village, which is currently one of the poorest villages in their area.
“The village was identified, together with Muyexe, as two villages in the province that needed development, however, we’re not satisfied with the overall progress out there,” he said.
Sekgoloane was very impressed by the progress that he saw in Muyexe, and said the village was well-developed compared to Ha-Kgatla, in that it had various facilities and services that many villages did not have.
“Everybody in Muyexe is employed, there are resources such as free Internet, a post office, the Thusong Service Centre, sports ground and many other things which you cannot find at a lot of other villages,” he said.
The development in Muyexe resulted from a comprehensive rural development programme that president Jacob Zuma launched after his State of the Nation address in 2009. The programme is one of the government strategies aimed to eradicate poverty in rural areas by turning villages into semi-urban areas that boast of government services at hand.
The whole programme was supposed to last two years, however due to some hiccups along the way, it is still on, with several projects still to be finished.
According to Greater Giyani mayor, Pat Hlungwani, 50 young people are currently being trained to do paving in order to come back and pave the main road of the village, which is 8km long.
