City Council to take over mosque maintenance
The mosques are cleaned by foreign employees belonging to private companies, and they don't do a very good job.
By
Fathmath Ahmed Shareef
The City Council has decided to carry out the cleaning and maintenance of mosques in Male area.
Mayor Adam Azim raised the administrative issue at the meeting held at the City Council on Wednesday, regarding how poor the maintenance work that was handed over to private companies was.
Therefore, he proposed to hire special staff under the supervision of the council.
"I propose that the council hire employees as soon as possible. And in the future, these employees will be converted to civil servants and we will continue”, Azim explained.
The motion was passed unanimously by all the councillors present at Wednesday's meeting.
Speaking in support of the proposal, Deputy Mayor Ahmed Nareesh said that the cleaning of mosques is now done by merging every five or six mosques into groups when handing over to companies.
This was handed over to private companies because of the difficulties faced with the civil service commission during the previous regime in recruiting civil servants, Nareesh said.
Nareesh added:
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There are complaints that the toilets in the mosques are always dirty
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There are no staff assigned to mosques who will properly monitor and maintain the mosques on a daily basis
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The mosques are cleaned by foreign employees belonging to private companies
"They're coming and doing a systematic sweep, up and down, and leaving. So you don't really see the love for the mosque, the respect for it and the sincere efforts in keeping them clean. So I'm very supportive of this proposal”, Nareesh said.
Supporting the motion, Mahchangolhi Central Constituency Councilor Ahmed Zameer said:
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People who live in the neighbourhood where the mosques are located and regularly go to the mosques to pray already clean it themselves
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Therefore, he suggested that such persons should be paid a wage for their work
"When hiring employees, I prefer to give priority to those who are already doing the job. They are already taking it up as their own to sweep and clean the mosques and try to even maintain the security. So if we can hire such people to maintain the mosques, I think this could be done very well,” Zameer said.
Supporting Zameer’s remarks, Mahchangolhi North constituency councillor Saeedha Rashad said that a lot of people in her constituency also complained about the dirty nature of the mosques and some of them had expressed their willingness to volunteer to do the work.
After these talks, Azim said that these suggestions will be given priority in recruitment of mosque maintenance in the future.
