Finances worry council chair
The chairperson of Kgatleng District Council (KDC), Daniel Molokwe has expressed concern over the council’s financial position. He was addressing councillors on Monday.
Molokwe said the financial position of the council is worrisome as they continue experiencing over expenditures in some votes under the recurrent budget.
“The total expenditure for our recurrent budget as of October 30, 2022, is P106.5 million against the seventh month’s expenditure target of P91.4 million. This implies an over expenditure of P15 million. Council conducted a budget review exercise in October this year to identify funds from slow spending votes to address over expenditures but the exercise was not beneficial as the funds identified were way below the over expenditure, only P1 million was realised and this did not address the problem at hand,” he said.
The council leader also said under revenue collection, the council continues to collect less revenue and this worsens its financial position further. In addition, he said as of October 30, 2022, the collection stood at P3.5 million against a target of P5.3 million.
He, however, said the situation calls for urgent attention and as the council, they need to double effort collection strategies and identify other strategies that can help to raise more revenue. Molokwe told councillors that a long outstanding project to formulate rates in order to increase revenue should be expedited.
He called on one of the relevant departments to expedite the valuation process and do it cost-effectively. Still at the council, on the issue of roads, the council chairperson said the Council Roads Division had been funded to the tune of P10 million, P5 million in the Road Levy, capital maintenance and Constituency Fund respectively.
“Tenders are floating and will be closed on December 2, 2022 and are expected to be completed before the end of this financial year. I hope this together with the Constituency Fund projects will help improve the state of our road infrastructure.
The projects entail reconstruction of Sikwane/Mochudi-Boseja Junction, resealing and pothole patching between Mmapole-Morwa-Bokaa traffic lights road, Bush clearing Mochudi main road, Morwa-Mmapole Road and parts of Old A1 road and spot improvement of gravel roads in most part of the district.
Ladies and gentlemen as indicated above, the perception that our council implementation is slow is demonstrated in this project,” he said.
He indicated that funds were released last year and sadly implementation is moving at a slow pace. Molokwe said the internal roads are in a bad state hence the delayed implementation of this project disadvantages Bakgatla.
He also informed councillors that the government has decided to do high-impact paving of internal roads on the constituency projects for the year 2023/24. However, the chairperson said they are experiencing vandalism to the road furniture as informed in the last sitting.
“Since they are insured we do claim from our insurer but this comes with inconveniences as we pay an excess and are left in darkness prior to being assisted,” he said.