The JB Marks Local Municipality Executive Mayor Gaba Thithiba Ka Qhele has promised jobs for residents over 35 years of age, especially those who own small enterprises that operate daily without depending on tendering system, where their focus as the municipality is to encourage them to grow their businesses through buying them tools to work at a budget of a Hundred to Two hundred thousand rands depending on the SMME request that they will be supplying. The Mayor said this last Thursday in Potchefstroom while presenting his unfunded 2 Billion Rand budget for the 2023/24 Budget Speech.
Qhele said the North West Province is sitting at 53 percent of the unemployment rate, and the majority of those in the 53 percent were people above 35 years, and that’s one of the reasons why his municipality is planning to reduce the number.
“People outside the brackets of 35 years are normally left out because our focus as the government is mainly on youth, women and people with disabilities, and the majority of people above 35 years are those that can’t be attracted to any job market due to lack of necessary skills to be appointed. The decision and the approach we are taking as the municipality is that the issue of doing services of the municipality through the tender process is not sustainable because there are activities that we can create more labour intensified kind of programmes,” he said.
The Mayor also admitted that shortages of people to be appointed in various posts is one of the challenges that led to a lack of service delivery in the municipality. “We have agreed with senior management that all vacant funded posts are going to be advertised to fill those posts and make sure that we no longer have people acting in certain departments, and there my role and my team as the executive is to play a proper oversight in making sure that services are rendered suitably to our communities,” he stated.
The Democratic Alliance’s Chris Hattingh said the unfunded budget is unsustainable, and the revenue is dropping while the expenditure is increasing in the municipality.
“We are coming from unfunded budgets in the past, and we have seen service delivery going down, and the municipality failed to spend 59 million rands given by the government for improvement of the infrastructure in the previous financial year that was taken back to the treasury, and now the municipality’s grants are reduced because of inability to have spent the money for service delivery. We need to cut down the expenditure and increase the revenue to have a proper service delivery,” he said.
The JB Marks Local Municipality is one of the coalition-led municipalities in the province, and it was also one of the two hung municipalities in the Dr Kenneth Kaunda District Municipality, where the DA has always had a strong showing.
