The North West provincial legislature’s portfolio committee on public works yesterday resolved to call on Public Works Minister Thulas Nxesi and Transport Minister Ben Martins to take over running the province’s public works, roads and transport department.

Last month the South African Institute of Civil Engineers drew attention to the parlous state of North West’s roads, saying this was harming economic activity, especially farming.

The committee would ask the two ministers to invoke a section of the constitution that allows the national executive to intervene when a province can not or does not fulfil its obligation, by taking “appropriate steps to ensure the fulfilment of that obligation”, said provincial legislature spokeswoman Namhla Luhabe.

This would probably be done next week, after a sitting on Tuesday in the legislature to discuss the department’s “collapse”.

The committee came to this resolution after North West Premier Thandi Modise refused to meet its members on the issue. This was after newspaper reports indicated the committee had already written to Nxesi about the department’s “collapse”.

But committee chairman Hoffman Galeng said the body had decided to speak to Ms Modise before writing to Mr Nxesi. It wanted to let her know that the department’s first quarterly report showed “nothing had been done or spent of the more than R3bn budget allocated to the department in April”.

“Last year we returned more than R600m to the Treasury because it was not spent, and yet our roads are in a bad state ,” Galeng said.

The department has had five heads in the past 12 months and its MEC, Raymond Elisha, did not “honour” invitations to appear before the committee “and has the audacity to even prevent his staff from accounting to the committee,” he said.

Source: Business Day