The Municipal Readiness Assessment Template (MRAT) shows that municipalities in the North West province do not have systems, measures or plans in place to implement the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Bill 16 of 2013 (SPLUMA). This was evident when scores of town planners across the province recently converged at Kedar Country Lodge near Rustenburg to seek solutions in dealing with hindrances when implementing SPLUMA.
Head of the Department of Local Government and Human Settlements, Monnapula Motlogelwa said the North West Town Planning Support Forum is a platform created by his department to enable planners to identify challenges and assess the state of readiness for the implementation of SPLUMA.
“We all know the kind of challenges we are facing when dealing this particular legislation. There are serious issues of non compliance and implementation. We need to assess all municipalities to get an indication on how ready are municipalities in terms of implementation of this bill,” he said.
In attempt to rescue the situation and ensure that all municipalities province are ready and capacitated to implement SPLUMA, Motlogelwa said that his department will assume certain kind of municipalities to support and help.
“The provincial government is willing to intervene where possible and absolutely necessary. We will also support those that seem to not have the necessary capacity to implement SPLUMA. We need to also force in our hand to encourage councils to pass resolutions on the matter so that we can speed up compliance and implementation”, Motlogelwa said
Sunday Ogunronbi of the Department of Rural Development said that municipalities in the province have to put proper management systems in place towards the implementation of SLUMA. “Municipalities need to find out, what is it that we need to do to get ready for implementation. The MRAT has given us an indication as to where we are and emphasis should now be on the work we need to do and the reality of it thereof”, he said.
Enquiries:
Spokesperson
Dineo Lolokwane
Tel: 018 388 2081
Cell: 072 542 8444
E-mail: dlolokwane@nwpg.gov.za
