Rural communities suffer without toilets despite millions unspent
1 September 2015
During a meeting of Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts today, it emerged that the Department of Human Settlements (DoHS) has been flagrantly contravening all legislation relating to the awarding of tenders to implementing agents for the delivery of the Rural Household Infrastructure Programme (RHIP).
About 2,6 million households still do not have access to basic sanitation services. The RHIP was set up to accelerate the delivery of basic services to rural households and these contraventions are a major setback to enhancing human dignity, quality of life and living standards for South Africans living in rural communities.
The committee meeting followed the release, earlier this month, of the Auditor General of South Africa (AGSA)’s special performance audit of the RHIP, which found that, between 2010 and 2013, only R501 million of the allocated R1.2 billion had been spent on building Ventilated Improved Pit (VIP) toilets across the country.
It has also emerged that the DoHS failed to spend more than R700 million of its allocated funds. The AGSA further found that the department failed to monitor the delivery of toilets by the outsourced management firms.