Musina Municipality accused of not catering for disabled people

Musina Municipality has come under pressure from a group of disabled residents who feel that their rights are not being respected and that the municipality is not doing enough to assist them.

According to Yunsa Mbewe, the secretary-general of the Vhembe branch of Disabled People SA, a meeting took place on 17 December in Musina during which they aired some of their grievances. He said that 244 disabled people were registered in the Musina municipal area.

Mbewe has been running the disabled structure of the municipality since 2016. Their new office building is next to the Lesley Manyathela stadium.

“Before using the new building as our offices, we used the community hall,” he said. Mbewe explained that the shared facility produced many headaches. “Once we are booked for the hall, the municipality would come and stop us for their own use of it. The most disturbing thing is that the municipality never communicates in advance their intention of using the hall,” Mbewe said. “Remember, we are talking about disabled people. Most of them struggle to come to the hall, only to be told a few minutes before (the start) that the meeting is cancelled.”

Mbewe also claims that a group of disabled people from Musina used to run a shop that was generating funds for their structure, but that the shop had been closed by the municipality.

“As a disabled structure of the municipality, we could not run it without funding, so we decided to run a shop to generate funds. We operated the shop for eight months, but it was closed down by the municipality. They (municipality) chased us around in circles as we tried to get permission to run the shop. We ended up closing the shop in 2019,” he said.

According to him, the structure is now running without any funding. He also said that most companies who received tenders from the government must include disabled people in their projects, but once the tender was awarded, the disabled people did not get the promised percentage.

At the time of our going to print, the municipality had not responded to the outcome of the 17 December 2020 meeting. The municipality undertook to respond before 21 December 2020, but that deadline had not been met.

Date:16 January 2021

By: Bernard Chiguvare

Bernard Chiguvare is a Zimbabwean-born journalist. He writes mainly for the online publication, Groundup.

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