By OBAKENG MAJE
15 May 2025- The North West MEC for Community Safety and Transport Management, Wessels Morweng said they have put measures in place to address the challenges experienced in the provision of the scholar transport service.
Morweng who addressed the media after the recent fiasco, where some scholar transport service providers downed tools due to non-payments said, there had been many challenges that scholar transport experienced and they had to implement some measures to deal with them. He further said these measures include establishing what they call the ‘War Room’ led by the Head of Department (HOD), Dr Hans Kekana, to resolve problems as they arise and they work together closely with their sister Department of Education.
“When the current contract began, we had 446 operators and in the service level agreement (SLA) we had with them, there are compliance clauses which guide steps to be taken when there are contraventions.
“The contravention as per the SLA includes amongst others, unroadworthy buses, failure to transport learners and endangering the safety of the learners,” said Morweng.
He added that they had already terminated 90 operators for one or more for contraventions mentioned above. Morweng said in the delay of payments, they had received 928 invoices and to date 552 have been processed.
“We experienced a system failure, which affected the processing of these payments. As a result, we have requested the Treasury to allow us to disburse two payments per week instead of one.
“We are now disbursing payments on Tuesdays and Fridays. We have already had two meetings with operators to explain challenges experienced. We are continuing with this engagement to keep operators abreast so that learners do not suffer,” he said.
Morweng said as part of intervention to ensure that operators are paid within the stipulated 30-day period, they are implementing a system used at the national government called ‘Re a patala’. He said it is an invoice tracking system that will assist them to quickly track and address areas where invoices get delayed.
“We are currently using a manual invoice tracking system which is problematic and prone to errors. One other problem with the manual system is that we are unable to see where there are delays in the value chain.
“Re a patala will be monitored daily and will assist in expediting payments once invoices are captured.
Challenges experienced are regretted but we do all we can to ensure that there are no further delays in processing payments,” said Morweng.
He said as has already indicated, engagement with operators is on-going. Morweng said they would also like to express their profound thanks to the operators for continuing to transport learners in spite of delays in payments.
The Guardian 