Mayors want money for development

THE Mayors’ Forum of Namibia has appealed to Government to support local authorities financially to help them address crucial problems such as urbanisation and poverty.

The Forum held its first meeting of the year at Ongwediva last week. Forum President Erastus Uutoni, the Mayor of Ongwediva, said urbanisation was one of the major challenges in every local authority in Namibia, because many people from rural areas were flocking to towns and municipalities were battling to keep up with service provision.”Therefore we are calling upon our central Government to make some funds available to local authorities as subsidy for us to enable us to solve some [of these] problems, such as thus the issue of urbanisation and poverty, the issue of town establishment, inadequate resources and HIV-AIDS in our towns and cities, because we regard these as national issues that cannot be left to towns and cities alone,” Uutoni said.He said HIV-AIDS is one of the issues that local authorities have to pay serious attention to, and they have to make sure that every town and city has programmes to deal with the pandemic.Forum President Erastus Uutoni, the Mayor of Ongwediva, said urbanisation was one of the major challenges in every local authority in Namibia, because many people from rural areas were flocking to towns and municipalities were battling to keep up with service provision.”Therefore we are calling upon our central Government to make some funds available to local authorities as subsidy for us to enable us to solve some [of these] problems, such as thus the issue of urbanisation and poverty, the issue of town establishment, inadequate resources and HIV-AIDS in our towns and cities, because we regard these as national issues that cannot be left to towns and cities alone,” Uutoni said.He said HIV-AIDS is one of the issues that local authorities have to pay serious attention to, and they have to make sure that every town and city has programmes to deal with the pandemic.