Pretoria - The North West province has heeded President Jacob Zuma's call for creating decent work by placing service delivery and job creation at the forefront of its plans for the year.
Delivering the State of the Province Address on Friday, Premier Thandi Modise said the province has launched "iterele" job creation and contract development initiatives, which aims to create 10 000 labour intensive jobs.
"Through this programme, we hope the youth, women and people living with disabilities will receive preferential opportunities," Modise told the legislature.
To ensure acceleration of service delivery, Modise, said they would introduce "the no plan, no budget, use it or lose it principle."
This, she hoped, would help to address underspending, encourage and enforce improvement in spending and commitment to service delivery.
"All departments shall develop data accumulation and analysis mechanisms which will provide credible and outcomes-oriented reports at all times. The quality of reporting, accountability and compliance to relevant legislation and prescripts will be improved," said Modise, who vowed to root out corruption.
The province has handled about 244 cases of corruption - of these 127 cases have been prosecuted, 33 cases returned to the Special Investigation Unit for further investigations, 180 cases which are still investigated and prosecuted, 96 cases that have been received and are to be investigated.
Modise said her province would do everything to ensure that the cases are brought to finality by next financial year.
Moving on to health, the Premier said they were planning to build one of the biggest revitalisation projects in the province which is the new Bophelong Psychiatric Hospital.
This project will create temporary and permanent jobs and more details will be released in the next financial year.
"As a way of improving the human resource challenge we have a plan in the North West province to produce 1592 health professionals in the next five years," said Modise, who was pleased with the province's progress in the massive HIV Counselling and Testing (HCT) campaign.
Since the campaign started, the province has counselled 637 681 and tested 504 064 people for HIV. It also screened 525 616 people for TB.
"Though I am pleased that the general HIV prevalence in the province is coming down, a lot still needs to be done to reach out to all our communities."
On education and skills development, the premier said her government plans to eradicate all mud schools, rid our schools of gangsterism and drugs, provide learner transport to schools and ensure that the schools nutrition programmes run desirably.
"Education is the foundation on which every society's development is built, we must do our utmost to create a good learning and teaching environment at all our schools," she said.
The province is also in a process of reviewing the North West Government Bursaries -that focuses on scarce skills.
So far the initiative has allocated 36 bursaries at the tune of R12 million to young people who must pursue paths relevant to the needs of government and the people.
Modise said all departments have developed workplace skills plans that will enable us to re-skill the human resources for retention purposes and for contribution to the national skills pool of resourceful persons.
