11 Mar 2014

Ministry of Local Government and Rural development has taken a decision to reduce backlog of maintenance of infrastructure for the financial year 2014/15 in the Central District.

This was said by the Central District Council chairman, Mr Lesego Raditanka when opening the full council session which started on Monday, March 10. He said the council was given more than P68 million under recurrent budget, pointing out that the figure was higher than the previous one.

The council chairman implored councilors to utilise funds to make sure that they improved the infrastructure in the district. He however said due to budgetary constraints, P27 million had to be adjusted from the amount to cater for primary school textbooks.

Furthermore, he said the recent rains had caused significant damages to roads in the district especially gravel and earth ones together with associated drainage structures.

He said the assessment had been carried out to make sure that the roads were brought back to an acceptable standard and as a result a total amount of more than P51 million would be required to maintain the roads adding that a request would be submitted at the ministry for funding.

On other issues, he said there has been substantial progress in the provision of low income housing under the house improvement program; turnkey and top as per the presidential directive of 2008.

He said so far 880 turnkey houses out of possible 1 211 were completed and others were at various stages of completion. The chairman revealed that since the establishment of the single housing authority there was no turnkey house which was completed to date.

He explained that the challenges noted by Botswana Housing Corporation as contributing to delayed completion of houses were unavailability of water on some sites, slow pace of contractors, difficulties in sourcing materials by some contractors amongst others.

As for the house improvement program, he noted that 751 out of 1 035 houses were completed to date. However, he said the major challenge encountered was the exhaustion of funds before the houses were completed due to limited budget because of the economic recession. ENDS