“Infrastructure delivery is critical to accelerating services to the society, while also it is key to boost the economy,” Matjhabeng local municipality Thanduxolo Khalipa reiterated this last month.
Speaking at the extensive participation for the Economic Development Summit held in collaboration with Infrastructure South Africa and Thabo Mbeki Foundation, Khalipa explained that the municipality is looking for ways to revive its economy by creating jobs and to fix the ailing infrastructure.
“The aim of this economic summit is to develop a plan that can assist the economical development plan of Matjhabeng to forge forward with economic plan to distribute better service to its residents,” said Khalipa.
“In our initial plans, infrastructure is at the forefront, and we want to zoom at it with a broader eye and also challenges in pump stations whereby all of them are not working at the moment,” added Khalipa who reiterated that dysfunctional pump stations for water sewerage has pulled a strain to the communities who have normalised to live with water sewerage spillages in their areas.
On a practical level, Khalipa said the infrastructure backlog gap requires over R2-billion in investment.
He said, accelerating the rollout of large infrastructure projects, would need to be done in partnership with the private sector because the fiscus was constrained, noted Khalipa.
“The national and provincial government have also pledged to assist us on infrastructure and have deployed task teams that are already doing a tremendous work in dealing with major setbacks and in addition, Bloem Water, has come on board to assist our municipality,” he added.
Free State department of Destea has come on board and mobilised investment at an amount of R1.2-billion for the 2022\23 financial year to priorities investment on infrastructure in the province.
Khalipa said the Free State’s treasury department has also aided the municipality with a whopping budget to work on its infrastructure backlog, inclusive of the road infrastructure.
Khalipa further unpacked that President Cyril Ramaphosa roped in head of the investment and infrastructure in the office of the Presidency, Kgosientso Ramokgopa to extend a helping hand to the municipality.
“We are currently working with Dr Ramokgopa to finalise our Business plan in terms of assisting with infrastructure plan of an amount of R7.8Billion, which close to an amount of R528 million will be invested in the sewage infrastructure,” detailed Khalipa.
The executive mayor further said, youth unemployment numbers remains a big concern in the municipality.
In May this year, figures released by Statistics South Africa showed unemployment was highest among those aged between 15 to 24 (63.9%) and 25 to 34 years (42.1%).
A total of 3.8 million out of 10.2 million people aged 15 to 24 years were unemployed.
In this call, Khalipa said the municipality has placed over 100 young people in the internship programmes, and partnered with institution of higher learning to place other portion in the internship and learnership programmes.
This summit held for two days from September 29-30, garnered an interest from executives offices ranging from the district, provincial and national, this included cabinet ministers, members of executive committee, Free State Premier Sefora ‘Sisi’ Ntombela and Lejweleputswa district mayor Veronica Ntakumbana.
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