CTO faced with decentralisation challenges
Tsaone Basimanebotlhe | Wednesday April 8, 2015 10:10
When answering a question in Parliament recently, the Minister of Transport Tshenolo Mabeo said due to unavailability of posts within the ministries, it was impossible to create fully functional transport units, even where there are officers. Tshenolo was responding to an enquiry from the Maun East MP, Konstatinos Markus who wanted the minister to outline the challenges faced by government departments following the decentralisation of maintenance from the CTO. “This led to lack of qualified personnel to facilitate preliminary inspection of vehicles before sending them for repairs in CTO accredited private garages. The result was continued reliance on the CTO personnel and use of CTO workshops,” Mabeo explained.
He said the other challenge was omission of some ministries to do budgetary provision for maintenance of their fleet, which resulted in some of the vehicles having to park in CTO workshops awaiting sourcing of funds to procure parts.
The minister said CTO maintenance vote was already reduced to cater for only pool vehicles under the care of the organisation.
“This resulted in a considerable number of the fleet being off road, which worsens the situation of shortage of transport. We are hopeful that the situation will improve in the next financial year as most ministries have made budgetary provision for maintenance in 2015/2016 financial year,” he said.
He said CTO has accredited some private garages through PPADB to ensure that government fleet was secure during maintenance.
The minister admitted that there had been, however, instances where some vehicles were taken to private garages that are not accredited.
He said the risk is that where these are not insured, government might lose out in case of fire and theft. The minister said they are continuously engaging the ministries to ensure that their transport officers are aware of the list of accredited private garages.