Johannesburg – The recently appointed Gauteng Department of Environment HOD, Blake Mosley-Lefatola, has invited environmental stakeholders to work with the province to address local environment challenges.
“The consolidation of the environmental agenda must be all-inclusive and build partnership, collaboration, and co-ownership,” Mosley-Lefatola said in an interview last week.
“Air pollution, management, protecting our wetlands and management of our conservation areas should be done together with the environmental stakeholders and the public in general.”
Mosley-Lefatola said Gauteng’s environmental challenges include “climate change and waste management.”
Accordingly, he called for the collective and cooperative implementation of the Gauteng Overarching strategy that addresses almost all the Gauteng environmental challenges.
“The strategy must be used by all the Gauteng province government departments, collaborating with the private sector, NGOs, and the society in general,” said Mosley-Lefatola.
He said that the Gauteng Department of Environment was “going to work with municipalities, private sector, NGOs and residents” to make the province cleaner and greener.
This will be achieved through regular clean-ups and tree planting.
Mosley-Lefatola said that the other Gauteng environmental management challenges include air pollution which contributes to climate change and water pollution which creates conditions for the growth of water weeds such as the water hyacinth which are sadly killing Gauteng’s lakes.
The cool-headed, tall, slender, and bespectacled Gauteng Province’s top environmental custodian said that the Gauteng Department of Environment needs to collaborate with businesspeople to ensure that people don’t build business infrastructure on wetlands.
An accomplished public servant, Mosley-Lefatola recently served as the HOD for the Gauteng Department of Economic Development.
Mosley-Lefatola acquired valuable experience in his previous senior management positions, which involved leading strategic planning and large-scale transformation projects.
Mosley-Lefatola was a Deputy Director-General for Public Sector Monitoring and Capacity Development in the President’s Office, Group Head for Strategy, Policy, Relations and Coordination at the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality, CEO of the State Information Technology Agency (SITA), CEO of the Gauteng Economic Development Agency (GEDA) and a Municipal Manager at the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality and also acting city manager for Ekurhuleni.
His new mission is to set up an effective Gauteng Department for Environment.
Mosley-Lefatola said there was a need for collective change in Gauteng’s residents’ attitude toward caring for the environment and cultivating a culture of pride in living in clean communities.
He said communicating the need to care for the environment was a key requirement for making residents of Gauteng appreciate and look after it.
Commenting on Gauteng’s waste management challenges, Mosley-Lefatola said: “We need to work with municipalities to implement the integrated waste management strategy.”
He said such a strategy would help ensure that the waste economy (an economy that operates based on waste, e.g. the recycling industry) was “implemented in the province so that we reduce waste from filling up the landfills.”
Mosley-Lefatola said: “The Gauteng Department of Environment is forming partnerships with the private sector to ensure environmental cleanliness in the central business districts, across the province”.
In that regard, Mosley-Lefatola said Gauteng, South Africa’s richest province, has a strategy called “Zero Waste to Landfills by 2050”.
“We need to work with municipalities to ensure that there are no illegal dumping sites,” he said.
