Gov�t owes WUC millions

Tsaone Basimanebotlhe | Friday December 16, 2016 15:31

 

This was after the MP for Francistown South Wynter Mmolotsi asked the Minister of Land, Water and Sanitation services if indeed government owes WUC.

“It is true that WUC is owed some money in the form of outstanding water supply bills by some Government departments.  The current total outstanding water supply bill is at P267, 821,233 as at November 2016. Currently, my Ministry is directly liaising with other Ministries encouraging them to pay their outstanding bills,” the assistant minister Itumeleng Moipisi said.

The assistant minister said every quarter, his Ministry would be submitting the Government water bills status to Cabinet in an effort to improve the situation.

However, the MP for Gaborone North, Haskins Nkaigwa asked the assistant minister if his ministry has intention to introduce prepaid water metres for government departments to allow usage on whatever one has paid.

The Minister said he believes that would be a good initiative that the Government can look into with a view to introducing that.

Moipisi told Parliament that though the government owes huge amount of money to WUC, they do not believe that could affect the corporation in a negative way, but they do talk to each department to show them the danger of failure to pay.

“I believe that different departments would pay to avoid a situation where we had affected operations of WUC because of our own debts,” he said.

Still in Parliament, MPs were told that there were 27,202 people on the SHHA waiting list in Francistown including applications received up to November 2016. Moipisi said the last allocation was done in May 2014.

“When plots are available, like in all urban centres, it takes six months to allocate SHHA plots in Francistown. Mr Speaker, I do not have a problem with the turnaround time for allocation of plots when they are available.

“This is borne out of the fact that we have to ensure equity in the allocation of plots. To that end, we give applicants up to three months to respond to the provisional offer while at the same time we manually vet them against records at the Deeds Registry, Botswana Housing Corporation and SHHA allocations in other urban centres,” he said.