Kgatleng District Council are running at high speed attending to a dangerous clinical waste dumped by a company that had leased a portion of the district’s landfill.
This was confirmed by council Chairman, Daniel Moloko, when opening the full council meeting on Monday adding that they estimate to spend around P800,000.00 to curb the health risk that may occur if it isn’t attended to.
“The situation is a potential public health hazard. It is against this realization that the council has decided to invoke Section 32 of Waste Management Act that empowers the Council to remedy the situation and later claim from the offender. However, the challenge is with poor financial position of the Council that makes the engagement of a private company at an estimated cost of around P800,000.00 extremely difficult,” Moloko said.
He appealed to citizens to emulate other nations to find business opportunities in the trash, saying recycling has huge financial rewards.
He said the District has been allocated P147.7 million for the 2022-2023 financial year and P4.3 million of it will be spent on COVID-19 preventative measures at primary schools.
The council had budgeted for P156.8 million for the financial year and will have to finance the deficit through its revenue streams.
However, the chairman expressed concern at the slow collection of revenue saying the council has failed to reach half of the targets in the past six months.
“The under collections are due to non-collection in some votes like advertising signs, interest on investments, sale of sundry items and matimela among others”.
Moloko said the district is faced with a challenge of illegal Day Care Centres and that it will be embarking on a comprehensive monitoring measure that will compel all centres to improve their operational standards and closing those that fail to comply where necessary.
Another challenge is the youth who were funded through Youth Development Fund who are unable to repay the loans for whatever reasons.
“The office has targeted for P280 701.76 per quarter, but managed to collect P8,600.00 . Youth are reluctant to service their loans despite their projects doing well. The office has embarked on recovering loans by issuing loan statements during monitoring and engaging youth to make repayment plans so that they make repayments.”
He confirmed that the Ministry of Youth, Gender, Sports & Culture has started approaching the courts to compel Youths to repay their loans.
