The Rundu Town Council has been ordered to stop using private contractors for basic maintenance work and instead utilise vocational training centre graduates and trainees to unblock drainage systems.
Urban and rural development minister James Sankwasa said this on Thursday during a site visit to assess roads in the area.
He said simple tasks are being outsourced while basic service delivery continues to deteriorate.
Sankwasa questioned why routine work such as unblocking drainage pipes was being outsourced when unemployed local youth with relevant training remain available.
“Who can we employ and pay?” the minister asked. “It’s just a question of how we want to make use of our resources. A contractor will come here and charge profit for whatever, when our own people are not even employed on the site.”
The minister questioned the town council’s leadership regarding the poor state of infrastructure and how conditions had been allowed to persist over several years.
“For five years you have been working here,” Sankwasa said, referring to Rundu Town Council chief executive Sakaria Shopati’s term in office.
He demanded to know what progress had been made regarding road management during that period.
Shopati responded that the council had constructed several gravel roads and resurfaced others, but Sankwasa rejected the explanation, saying the discussion was about visible, unresolved problems on the ground.
“We are not talking about resurfacing, I am talking about these issues that are here,” the minister said.
Shopati cited financial constraints, explaining that engineers had advised that the roads would need to be fully rebuilt to properly channel water, which the council could not afford to do at once.
He said work was, therefore, being carried out in phases.
“That is the challenge of engineering,” Shopati said. “We were doing it in smaller phases because the technical people will tell you we need to rebuild these whole roads for us to channel the water.”
Sankwasa said the situation is unacceptable and failure to address basic maintenance issues promptly would only worsen service delivery problems.
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