Orlando Chauke
LIMPOPO – THE Greater Giyani Municipality unveiled a new top of the range grader, which was acquired at R1,8 million to add to its aging graders.
Speaking last Thursday during the hand-over of the grader to municipal workers, the Giyani mayor, Pat Hlungwani said the municipality bought new graders every financial year to ease the current road maintenance backlog.
“As the municipality, we’re aware of the current backlog as far as grading of our streets is concerned, this is why we’re not only buying graders, but are also coming up with new ways in which to improve the road maintenance services in the municipality,” he said.
According to Hlungwani, one of the new strategies that the municipality came up with was to station graders in all focal points of service so that when the need to grade a street rose, the municipality would be able to dispatch the nearest grader to service the concerned street or community.
The mayor further said the graders would be used only in the grading of the internal streets in more than 100 villages around the municipality, including the new extended villages, some of which had never been graded before due to shortage of graders.
“In total we now have five graders, two of which are old, and it takes time to fix them once they are broken, because their parts have to be ordered from outside the country,” explained the mayor, adding that the new graders were easy to repair as their parts could be sourced locally.
“Apart from that, we have instructed our technical team to employ experts that would be able to fix our machinery right here at home whenever there’s a need for them to be fixed so that our service is not hindered in case the machinery gets broken on the job,” he said.
