With only 15 professional librarians employed across the Northern Cape’s 225 libraries, the Democratic Alliance (DA) will request the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture to report on its plan to fully operationalise these facilities.
In addition to crippling staff shortages, the steady decline in the standard of services provided at Northern Cape libraries is attributed to a dire lack of invest in the sector.
For the past four years, the department has consistently reported on its inability to meet its target for the procurement of library material, managing to achieve 53,5% procurement of 160 000 planned library materials in last financial year.
Due to consistent budget cuts, municipalities are also unable to maintain library facilities, exacerbating their inability to replace equipment and furniture such as telephones, photocopiers and security appliances.
The DA is concerned that libraries, as critical centres of reading, learning and economic opportunity, will continue to collapse under the weight of staffing pressures, the decline of book collections and the poor state of especially container libraries.
The DA has requested the department to appear before the committee to table its plan to address the critical state of libraries. We need a clear indication of how the allocated amount of R206 million will be utilised. The low target of only 15 library sites due to receive maintenance materials for the current financial year, is not enough to compensate for ongoing lack of investment in the sector.
We are also seeking answers on how the R42 million set aside for maintenance, building and operational expenditures, will be used to prevent interrupted library services.
Well functioning libraries have the potential to raise the literacy rate, increasing access to economic opportunities and uplift the morale of even the most impoverished communities. We will therefore not allow these facilities to become shadows of the increasingly forgotten culture of reading.