Mayor heeds Seshego’s call for engagement session

POLOKWANE – This, he said, is because many residents build rooms for rent in yards given to them by the municipality and that this disrupts the smooth supply of water services and results in high electricity tariffs.

“Some residents house people from other areas who don’t contribute to rates and taxes but who share our limited resources. Of course this puts pressure on us to provide more water.”

Mpe answered some tough questions in an engagement session with Seshego residents on September 1 at the Ngoako Ramahlodi Hall. The meeting was meant to resolve pressing issues including high electricity tariffs and the continuous shortage of water. A few days earlier, residents marched to the municipal offices with a memorandum of demands.

The municipal budget as received from National Treasury is calculated based on the number of people who live in a specific municipal area as per statistics from the Census and Stats SA.

As such, the mayor says people who squat in areas where they have not been counted, cause financial constraints for the city.

“These constraints disempower the municipality from sourcing quality machinery to supply services to its people.”

Mpe did not turn a blind eye to the benefits these hired rooms have for indigent households, but said he is concerned that they destruct the plan to fully develop local townships.

“The backrooms may help our people financially but they are to our disadvantage.”

Some residents also raised issues about the backlog in the supply of RDP houses, with Rose Rangoanashe from Zone 5 sharing her story.

“I applied for a house in 1999 but it has still not been approved. I have all the documents with me to prove it,” she said.

Mpe said he is confident that the majority of problems faced in the provision of RDP houses in the municipal areas can be solved more readily as those experienced by overpopulated provinces such as Gauteng.