Four days of izinyoka misery for Pefferville

RESIDENTS from Lower Pefferville outside East London took to the streets yesterday after four days without power.

Cables and Zepher streets lost power on Saturday morning with no warning and residents say they lodged numerous reports at the municipality to no avail.

When the Dispatch team arrived yesterday residents voiced their frustrations with the ongoing outage. Ganni Dorosamy said the power cut had not only inconvenienced them but affected businesses that are run in the area.

He has a car repair workshop in his backyard so the loss of power has been particularly hard.

“It has made our lives unbearable. We cannot cook, we cannot do anything,” said Dorosamy.

His neighbour Hellen Van Bosch said they had been ignored by the municipality despite repeated attempts to inform the authorities of their plight.

“We have lost money through the food that we had to throw away because we have no fridges and we are ratepayers to this city.

“It is unacceptable to have a power outage that drags on for four days with not even a single communication from the municipality alerting us of what could be the problem,” said Von Bosch.

Buffalo City Metro spokesman Samkelo Ngwenya yesterday said the city was battling a deluge of rogue connections.

“We have a huge challenge in that area of illegal connections where people have bypassed the meters.

“It is really very unpleasant for everyone.

“For us as a city it is costing us money and resources to keep going back to remove these illegal connections and make repairs.

“For the locals, it is also equally frustrating being without lights. Unfortunately this issue is not confined to this area and our team, which has to be accompanied by law enforcement for their safety, has been raiding other areas,” said Ngwenya. —