WSU digs go without power
FIFTY students living in a Walter Sisulu University (WSU) residence in Southernwood have been without electricity for the past two weeks.
One of the students at Majestic Mansions, who remained anonymous, said management had been informed of the situation, but to no avail.
Students said they had also sent numerous e-mails to the university’s residence office informing it about the outage.
The Public Relations, Building, as well as Electrical and Mechanical engineering students said they wanted to move. Majestic Mansions’ residence landlord, Malibongwe Mtuzula, who started renting out the building to the university last year, said he had not loaded pre-paid electricity at the residence because he had not been paid by WSU.
“I have been loading electricity without payment since February. Every time I ask when the rent will be paid, I am always given the run-around and they have not given me a time-frame as to when will it be paid.
“At this point there is nothing I can do as I don’t have money to load electricity.”
He said he had already spent about R12000 on pre-paid electricity.
WSU spokesperson, Yonela Tukwayo, said the university management was working on sorting out the issue.
“There have been some delays in our payments to the landlord due to the backlog in processing [payments] due to the recent protest action, but we are sorting out the issue.
“We aware of the problem but it is not true that the whole residence is without electricity because to our understanding it is a number of floors for which the landlord has not loaded electricity due to nonpayment.”
The finance department was looking at fast-tracking the payment to Mtuzula.
She said that full operations at the university, which recently faced protest action due to accommodation grievances, had been restored and that classes had resumed.