Bench Marks in collaboration with Jagersfontein community

Menge Agnes Choledi

For us is a concern as a community to see the government not interested in working together
with us to fix the mess that happened to our town. Since the incident, we see only Benchmarks
Foundation working together with us, but the government or municipality and the mayor are not
working with us instead they are fighting us. For example, we are looking forward to a building
where we can work as an office or place of work, but unfortunately, the mayor and municipality
are not willing to help us because we are going to expose their corruption.

We are aware that the government doesn’t support the work that the Benchmarks Foundation is
doing, because they won’t accept bribes, money laundering also illicit financial flow will be
targeted. Now that’s why we can’t be given a space to work from as a monitoring school that is
looking forward to developing mining communities to better living standards.

We wrote a letter to the mayor asking for land to do agricultural activities but until now he never
responded. We also went to our municipality office seeking help for a building to work from but
they refused and told us that there were no buildings we could buy or occupy, but we know it’s
only a lie because there are too many vandalized or unoccupied buildings all around our town
that can be used for community purposes but due to corruption it’s hard for them to recognize
us together with Bench Marks foundation.