By Emily Setona
QWAQWA – The Free State provincial government says it believes incoming acting Municipal Manager Amos Goliath is the man to bring administrative stability to Maluti-a-Phofung (MAP) after Monyane Sefantsi failed at this task.
The MEC of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA) Teboho Mokoena mentioned that a new acting MM will be brought on who the Provincial government believes will be able to bring administrative stability to MAP.
Mokoena said this during at a media briefing at an extraordinary intervention meeting held in MAP on July 12, where he was joined by the premier a week after his service delivery intervention visit to the municipality.
“As the council sits on Tuesday next week, they will process things so that the new acting MM can start. His first task on the table is to stabilize the municipality administratively and trigger the process of the employment of a full-time MM, and the employment of the senior managers so that the municipality can function normally and be able to address all service delivery issues. At the current moment under the current circumstances, it is completely difficult to handle service delivery issues because at a higher level there is instability, there is no accountability, and there is no management of a lot of areas.
“We need a municipal manager who is permanent not an intervention; we have given ourselves three months’ starting from next week Tuesday, that the acting MM is the first thing they need to do together with the new executive mayor is to complete the process and if the process has gone against the timelines, they’ll have to start it afresh. We will help them to ensure that come the next three months, Maluti-a-Phofung should be having a permanent municipal manager who will work with the staff for the next five years to really make sure that they resolve their issues to bring administrative stability to this local municipality.
FS Cogta MEC Teboho ‘Saki’ Mokoena.
“On our side we will come back every second or third week to assess the progress. If there are challenges, they’ll have to trigger mechanisms to make sure that we do stick to the agreements that we have reached with them today,” Mokoena said.
According to Premier Maqueen Letsoha-Mathae, the resolution that they came to during this meeting was that they would have a provincial team tasked to assist MAP to deal with its various service delivery challenges.
“Immediately after the SONA, we will be back here with a team of ministers. As I’m here there is a team that is meeting back at my office meeting with the Eskom regional team just to engage on the contents of the DAA that was signed here,” the premier said.
