Kweneng Landboard, a response
Correspondent | Thursday October 10, 2013 20:31
Kweneng Landboard has seven subordinate landboards including Mogoditshane. We would like to state that contrary to what is claimed; Mogoditshane is the better staffed subordinate landboard as compared to the other six (6) sub-landboards.
A number of staff members were pulled from other sub-landboards and the main landboard to reinforce staffing of the station.
With regard to the issue of fuelling vehicles in Molepolole we would like to note that an administrative decision was taken to fuel vehicles in one village since it would be administratively cumbersome to fuel official vehicles at every village.
It must also be noted that our vehicles have the capacity to be in operation for quite a number of days without necessarily having to refuel.
Regarding the issue of missing files, we do experience situations of missing files. We have had a challenge regarding our record-keeping, this however emanated from among others the previous arrangements where documents of various customers were kept in one file. As an attempt to improve on this, individual files have been opened.
As a further improvement to this, the landboard is currently engaged in capturing more information through the land registration exercise (LAPCAS). Among other benefits of this exercise is to enhance record-keeping, something that we expect our honourable former chairman to have known and communicated to the entire public.
We would like to note that Kweneng Landboard is facing serious challenges in regard to availing land in Mogoditshane.
The situation is worsened by the reluctance on the part of the land rights holders to release their land for redistribution, e.g. most of the areas mentioned by the author as available are not really available since some people still hold rights to those parcels and are reluctant to release them.
We would like to state on record that Kweneng Landboard is not aware of any programme dubbed 'Bana ba Masimo'.
However some years back, as an incentive to encourage people to release land to some people who promised allocation of plots to their children over and above the full compensation stipulated on the guidelines.
This initiative has since been stopped after realising that most people were abusing it.
Regarding the claim that there is a 350 hectare of serviced land in Gabane Block 1, this is not just misleading but equally untrue.
What we are aware of as the landboard is that a layout was once prepared for the area in question, unfortunately water and sewage reticulation was also undertaken on the same piece of land.
It was later realised that water and sewage reticulation was done without necessarily following the layout design in place which resulted in the contamination of the same, something that was not even the responsibility of the landboard.
However, parties involved agreed that an economically sensible option would be to re-design the layout. The re-designing is currently at an approval stage. It is also important to note that the said piece of land is not really available as there are still existing pending arable field rights that need to be compensated.
Hope the above information is clear.
Molebedi Khuduego
Board Secretary
Kweneng Landboard