Note to editors: Please find attached English and Sesotho soundbites by Cllr David Masoeu.
Mangaung municipality fails residents yet again by not spending funds meant to improve service delivery. The areas most affected include Botshabelo, Thaba Nchu and other informal settlements. The municipality has for the past five years claimed to have ring-fenced funds to upgrade and install sewer pipelines only to fail dismally to appoint service providers to implement the projects. The residents of Mangaung are often given frivolous reasons or even misled that the bids for these contracts have been advertised only to be cancelled due to so-called disputes with contractors. Please see the pictures here, here, here and here.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) has on several occasions warned the municipality that failure to spend funds will lead to the municipality being dissolved since both the Provincial and National interventions have dismally failed to improve service delivery in Mangaung. The Auditor General has repeatedly warned for through the past three consecutive audit reports that failure to spend funds will lead to Treasury withholding grants to the municipality that would have dire consequences for service delivery.
In the previous financial year, MMM had to return more than R800 million in grants to the Treasury that were meant to upgrade the same sewer and water provision in the underdeveloped informal settlements to assist residents with sewer and water problems. As it stands it is only a month from the closure of the current financial year yet no contractor has been appointed to lay pipes in areas where there are still pit toilets and bucket systems. Residents living in these areas have to endure hardships with sewer spillages engulfing houses because of ineffective sewer pipelines that have not been upgraded or overburdened with house connections because the system has not been upgraded for the past ten years.
The DA is once again appealing to the municipality to appoint a contractor urgently to avoid continuous loss of funding as this will further deteriorate the already dire situation of sewer spillages and water shedding in Mangaung resulting in further suffering of residents.
The community of the Free State and Mangaung will once again get the opportunity on 29 May to vote for a caring DA–led government to bring change to the Free State.