The DA has today written to the MEC for Sports, Arts and Culture, Thandi Moraka, seeking her immediate intervention at Saselamani Library.
During an oversight inspection last week, the DA discovered that the library has been neglected and is showing serious structural faults just eight years after it was opened. View photos here, here, here and here.
The water supply at Saselamani is inconsistent. Librarians and clients have to carry water to the toilet in buckets. The borehole is not functional and nothing has been done, even though it was reported during the lockdown.
The yard is overgrown with grass and weeds as there are no groundsmen.
Maintenance work carried out at the library was left unfinished and this shows that there is no monitoring by the department or municipalities on service providers. This also raises concerns over their plans to maintain 12 libraries in the current financial year.
Oversight visits to libraries across the province continue to prove that libraries are either on the verge of collapsing, neglected, understaffed or not being well maintained by the local municipalities or the department.
Moraka and her department must urgently attend to the library’s ceiling and incomplete maintenance work, fix the borehole and temporarily allocate Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) workers to clean the yard.
The DA cares strongly about community libraries and believes they should be centres of knowledge that empower our young people to learn about their world and to make a difference. Without well maintained library services, our communities cannot develop.