BY MBONGENI NDLELA
MBABANE – As part of his duty to keep Eswatini’s developments in concert, Prime Minister Cleopas Sipho Dlamini received the most recent presentation of challenges facing the Natural and Resources outlook of Eswatini. This happened on his tour to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Energy.
The Prime Minister was presented with various challenges, ranging from departments that are understaffed to the lack of certain maintenance of special equipment. As an example, the Acting Director of Water Affairs which is one of the departments said they were having challenges with old resources.
The Prime Minister gave some of his responses and advice during the tour, suggesting optimisation strategies such as “we have such specialised equipment, it makes it very difficult that we can go to a simplistic supply contractor, where the company might not even have a workshop in the country where we can buy spare parts for maintenance.”
The Prime Minister also suggested that the procurement of vehicles in the departments should take into account the need for having a local maintenance schedule.
The Minister of Natural Resources and Energy, Peter Bhembe, introduced new suggestions for maximizing the responsible use of Eswatini resources. For example, he suggested that the country should mandate that each company in the business of extracting natural resources should be required to convert it at least once. This means that the country would be exporting higher value raw materials for further production downstream, instead of exporting the minerals straight from the ground and capturing the minimum value of the resources within Eswatini.
The Prime Minister promised that his office will help in improving the parts of the operations of the Ministry’s departments that need further help. In the meantime, the Prime Minister suggested that the Ministry hold the standards of utmost performance and quality by ensuring that they go above and beyond the call of duty where they can, as modelled by first-world culture.
The Prime Minister continues to tour the country’s different ministries, to best align the country’s goals for development as well as operations towards them.
