EPWP extends to 3 years, road infrastructure a priority

With service delivery protests seemingly becoming the norm in the province, officials at the Department Public Works, Roads and Infrastructure who fail to spend money budgeted for community projects are likely to face harsh consequences.
This after MEC Monica Mochadi during an interview told Polokwa­ne Observer that no money should be returned to the National Treasury at the end of this financial year because officials failed to utilise the funds set aside for projects. According to Mochadi there should be a shifting of funds to ensure that the core units and essential services are fully budgeted for to realise the mandate of the department. She further stressed that there was no way she would allow the four programmes they have in the department not to spend the allocated budget.
Officials who fail to use the budgets will have to account she stated. Officials will have to pay the money returned to Treasury from their pockets because this has a negative impact on the people, Mochadi explained and added that no one should get a salary whereas they failed to deliver services. People fight day in and out for roads, she remarked and reiterated that since her deployment she haven’t been popular in the media because she has been engaging with communities that have been protesting due to lack of service delivery.
She went on to say they have priority list of roads that they found to be problematic when she arrived at the department such as backlogs, Bermuda roads, hotspots roads and principal pronounced roads. According to Mochadi the Provincial Government does not have enough money to deliver roads all at once and requested residents to be patient. She reckoned that by 2023 they would have completed most of the roads in the province. She further revealed that the department was not doing well on properties and facilities. She added that they have a lot of properties across the province and they wanted to put them all in the register for them to be renovated and donated to municipalities and military veterans.
Highlighting programmes her office intends to introduce, Mochadi said the expanded public works programme (EPWP) has been used by many homes to put bread on the table but it wasn’t enough as participants join the initiative poor and leave poor when it ends. The department intends extending the EPWP to three years.
“We want to groom our people into entrepreneurs and share the skills for them to be employable. We recently launched the fourth phase of EPWP in Makhado where we pronounced the three year plan that is set to start next year. Revitalisation of mechanical workshops are some of the priorities because we are tired of paying exuberant amounts of monies to the private sector for them to fix our cars. We are going to employ more mechanical, fitting and turning engineers from the Technical and Vocational Education and Training colleges to repair cars and manufacture desks in our workshops,” Mochadi explained.

Story/photo: ENDY SENYATSI
>>endy@observer.co.za