Africa-Press – Eswatini. THE government is falling apart and the country is losing billions of Emalangeni due to poor maintenance of the infrastructure that has been invested over the years.
This was revealed by the Ministry of Public Works and Transport head of department. This was during the Prime Minister Cleopas Sipho Dlamini’s tour to the ministry yesterday.
This is the fourth ministry that the premier has toured since last year November when he started his familiarisation of each government ministry’s department and parastatals as well as their duties. Heads of department and public enterprises Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and directors also got the chance to voice out their challenges to the prime minister during this tour.
The ministry of public works is responsible for every government building in the country, roads and transportation.
Almost all the different head of departments who were presented before the prime minister as well as the public works minister Chief Ndlaluhlaza Ndwandwe decried the lack of a maintenance budget as the main reason the government buildings and structures, as well as roads were in such a bad state of dilapidation.
Acting Chief Building Engineer Manzolwandle Lukhele wasted no second of the five minutes he was allocated for his presentation.
“The maintenance department is not performing to the expected standards and it is clear to everyone,” he said.
Lukhele stated that government had been investing a lot in capital projects but to the neglect of maintenance of existing structures. He said there was no maintenance budget.
The absence of the budget dragged for so long to the extent that government buildings are now falling apart. The engineer said after noting that the buildings were falling apart they ended up swindling the recurrent budget.
These funds were for hiring professionals responsible for preparations of pre-tender documents like geotaxis survey and presidency studies. However, those funds have proved to be not enough, given that there is a lot that needs to be done.
“We need to fix 50 buildings and we have issued out a tender for the repair of 30 government houses in Selection Park, Mbabane,” he said.
“We no longer maintain to avoid being flooded with complaints but simply allocate a budget per building.
A house is allocated at E100 000 in order to be able to conduct populated maintenance. This is because there are so many government houses that need to be maintained,” he added.
Leaking
The ministry only conducts spot maintenance like fixing leaking roofs.
The Chief Roads Engineer Vincent Dlamini also lamented the bad state of the roads. He admitted that most of the country’s roads were beyond their life span and to make things worse was that they were poorly maintained.
“The roads maintenance has not been consistent over the years because budgets kept on being reduced thus the forecast on maintenance was shifted and roads were left to dilapidate. The cyclone and on-going rains have exposed the problem further,” he said. According to Dlamini, the tarred roads need to be rehabilitated as well as resealing, which he revealed was no longer happening yet this was crucial for every tarred road every seven years
He further told the PM that the potholes that were in public roads in the country were a symptom of a structural failure and therefore patching them was no longer helping as problem to be attended from a structural point of view.
Eswatini Civil Aviation Authority (ESWACAA) Director General Andile Mtetwa as well as Royal Eswatini National Airways Corporation CEO President Dhlamini also emphasised the need for maintenance of infrastructures.
The two spoke strongly about the crucial need for maintenance of the King Mswati III International Airport. It was revealed that the airport runway which was crucial in the landing of planes.
Revealed
Another issue was the availability of fire trucks at the airport. Mtetwa said the current fire trucks at the airport were over 20 years old among other equipment, some of which were second-hand.
Only a few items were bought brand new. She further revealed that the country had to give up its responsibility of regulating air space above 2 000, which was given to South Africa because the country has a shortage of skills and lack proper equipment to perform some tasks.
The RENAC CEO also pleaded to government to support ESWACCA so that it could be able to rehabilitate the airports in the country. This is because following the launch of Eswatini Airways the airport would be working a lot because it would be connecting passengers to over three international airports which included King Shaka International airport in Durbar, Oliver Tambo in Johannes burg and Harare in Zimbabwe.
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