Eden district mayor Rudi Laws has blamed the lack of broadband internet technology for backlogs in municipal projects.

Eden district mayor Rudi Laws has blamed the lack of broadband internet technology for backlogs in municipal projects.

By Cathy Dippnall

Eden district mayor Rudi Laws has blamed the lack of broadband internet technology for backlogs in municipal projects.

He was responding to local government MEC Richard Dyantyi‘s accusations last month that municipalities were dragging their heels in implementing funding for these projects.

Laws said an impeding factor was that the web-based system to register the projects did not have enough bandwidth. As a result, they cannot register the projects.

Laws said the province should have found an alternative solution for registering flood-relief projects.

His response comes after Dyantyi attended the Disaster Management debriefing in Wilderness on February 22. At the briefing, Dyantyi accused municipalities of spending only 50 per cent of funds allocated to disaster relief after the floods in August.

Of the R365-million disaster relief funding allocated to Eden, R275-million was allocated for municipal infrastructure repairs. So far, R114-million has been spent.

The municipal infrastructure grant, which is managed by the department of provincial and local government, maintains a website on which applications for disaster funding have to be registered electronically. "The website has proven extremely difficult to access because of the lack of bandwidth, which causes it to bomb out frequently when you are online,” said Laws.

He said the debriefing process also revealed that the current processes were too long and that a better process should be designed and put in place.

Laws said the question was raised at the debriefing that funding should have been channeled through the Eden district municipality as it had played a role in requesting that the South Cape be declared a disaster area.

"It is also important to note that the district municipality has a good relationship with its municipalities and the channelling of funds though Eden would have been less complicated,” he said.

Red tape had also prevented the disbursal of funds from the department of agriculture, said Laws.

He said Eden could not co-ordinate the spending of provincial department allocations, such as the department of agriculture, if they did not enter into a formal agreement with them.

He said legislation needed to be reviewed to allow for the rapid and instantaneous disbursal of funding in the case of future disaster situations.

cdippnall@johnnicec.co.za


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