SIKHUNYANE – Pres Thabo Mbeki vowed that he would not tolerate and accept any form of failure and he would deal firmly with any form of corruption and mismanagement of funds to the detriment of the community. "We want to say to everybody, including those coming from the private sector, that we will deal firmly with any form of corruption that may surface as we implement this programme."

He said this at Sikhunyane Village, outside Giyani on Tuesday, where he officially launched the Expanded Public Works Programme, a project that is part of the Gundo Lashu Provincial Labour Intensive Rural Roads Rehabilitation programme. The programme is also part of government's comprehensive strategy to create jobs through labour-intensive infrastructure projects that will use more people as the labour force than heavy machinery used in construction works.

Mbeki said that the government and the private sector are still faced with a central challenge of bridging the gap between the first and second economies as the previous government left a large number of people unskilled. He said that the programme will create jobs and provide training to the relatively unskilled since the current economy needs the skilled and educated. The President adds that Gundo Lashu has set out to train 24 local emerging contractors who will, in the first three years of the programme, rehabilitate 300 to 500 km of rural roads and create 500 000 jobs in the process.

More than 200 people in the Sikhunyane community are already employed in the programme to construct roads and bridges, making their villages accessible and linking them infrastructurally to the outside world. Mbeki told the residents that the success of the programme depended on a strong partnership between government, labour, business and communities to address issues such as job creation, poverty and development.

Mbeki thanked the Lesotho department of Rural Roads for training contractors in two groups of 12 in 2002 in labour-based road works, and the United Kingdom department for International Development for funding the technical assistance and training. The Premier of Limpopo Province, Mr Sello Moloto, said that he commited his provincial government and local departments to make the programme a success.

Moloto said that the recruitment procedure is that contractors employ workers from the communities adjacent to the road sections where the work is taking place, with one person being employed for three to six months and then being laid off and new ones recruited as the road works progress from one village to another.

The Minister of Public Works, Ms Stella Sigcau, told the meeting that her department is going to create about 1 million jobs through the programme, which she said was designed as an integral part of her department.