The Committee’s oversight visit to the North West province is one of 38 scheduled visits by different committees of the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) this week, intended to oversee the running of public facilities in different provinces across the country. The committee is unhappy with the department’s failure in meeting its targets for the first quarter and is not confident in the department’s ability to meet its target of building 12 000 RDP homes for the 2017/18 financial year. The Committees chairperson, Nocawe Mafu, says the committee is further perplexed by how much the department has regressed over three years from being the province with the best delivery of RDP houses to local communities to now being the province with the worst record.

The North West Department of Human Settlement’s spokesperson, Ben Bole, in reaction to the Committee's concerns, says that the department has pledged to improve the rate at which RDP houses are built and assigned to beneficiaries.

The Committee visited the Mahikeng Community Residential Unit, among others, in North West on Monday and they found that the unit was completed in 2014, but beneficiaries will only be assigned homes in September 2017. According to Bole, the delays were caused by contractors as well as inadequate planning, which was the case in the Rooigrond Project, where RDP homes were built without water, sewerage and electricity connections. Bole went on to say they have advised municipalities to prevent the illegal occupation of land which continues to contribute to the housing backlog, some of these informal settlements are growing in Ventersdorp and the aforementioned Rooigrond.

Transcript: “The issues at Mahikeng Community Residential Unit was electricity connections and now that the issues have been solved the municipality will now facilitate the process of assigning homes to beneficiaries,” says Bole.

OFM News/Olebogeng Motse