President’s broken promise leaves disabled kids desperate
President Cyril Ramaphosa visited Kgaugelo Stimulation Centre in May last year and allegedly promised that Ekurhuleni Mayor Mzwandile Masina would ensure land was allocated to them.
However, the centre’s founder Linah Mabaso is disappointed that nothing has been communicated to them since the president’s visit.
“It is like our children with disabilities are not a priority to our government. They are focused on the ‘normal children’ since schools are being built for them,” she said.
High-powered
Mabaso thought the high-powered visit by the president together with the Gauteng premier David Makhura and the Ekurhuleni mayor Mzwandile Masina would yield results to a struggle she had been dealing with for years.
“We thought that since the president told the mayor to ensure that we get land, our struggle would be over. We need land so that we can build a bigger facility because we keep turning away children due to a lack of space. We are renting and cannot build on land we do not own,” she said.
Ekurhuleni spokesperson Themba Radebe said the president and premier did not have the authority to mandate the mayor to allocate land.
“Land allocations are currently distributed through the Rapid Land Release Programme led by the provincial government,” he said.
Exempted
Radebe added that registered NGO’s were exempted from paying assessment rates and only paid for services such as water consumption, sewerage and refuse removal.
Mabaso, however, believes the amounts they are being charged are “exorbitant”.
“We sometimes have to pay about R3000 and we find it to be too much since we are struggling financially. I wish that more could be done to assist us because we are providing a much needed service in the community.”
Forty children are currently being cared for at the centre with several hundred being kept on a waiting list until a bigger facility can be built. – Health-e News
Author
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
President’s broken promise leaves disabled kids desperate
by Marcia Moyana, Health-e News
February 20, 2019