It’s still lights out for some Emfuleni residents

Dark times persist for many Vaal residents as the Emfuleni local municipality battles to keep the lights on.

Old infrastructure, cable theft and burnt transformers are among the long list of issues that Emfuleni attributes as the causes of the power cuts that are continuously affecting the area.

On 30 March, Peacehaven residents took to the streets to express their frustration with the power outages after a substation allegedly “blew up” – allegedly due to receiving no maintenance since 1937.

The protest saw Emfuleni mayor Gift Moerane paying the area a visit on 8 April, to promise residents power restoration.

“Following a site inspection held on Thursday, 1 April, the municipality has secured two service providers to restore the substation and replace damaged cables,” said Moerane, according to an article published on the municipality’s website.

“The restoration of electricity in the area remains top of the list for the municipality and as executive mayor, I am willing to go to extreme lengths to ensure that this matter is resolved with the urgency it deserves.”

Residents, nonetheless, spent a further four weeks without electricity.

Peacehaven resident Michelle Peterson says power was only restored on 25 April.

Residents were told “it’s only a temporary solution as the main problem would take six more weeks to repair”.

According to another resident, who asked to remain anonymous, they were going into week four without electricity in their area, Tshirela.

Community members had marched to municipal offices in Vanderbijlpark in previous weeks, but the gates were quickly closed and they did not receive any attention from staff.

“This thing of not having electricity is happening every year [especially] when we approach winter. Our community believes the municipality is cutting off the lights intentionally.”

Klippies Kritzinger, chief executive of the Golden Triangle Chamber of Commerce, says the power outages are a result of the municipality’s incompetence, misuse of funds and failure to pay Eskom.

“Emfuleni municipality owes Eskom R3.5 billion and is not honouring the current account,” he said. “In the previous financial year, Emfuleni used only 3% of all the grants given to them by National Treasury and that is a huge problem.”

In the 2019-20 financial year, Emfuleni recorded revenue of over R6 billion and electricity revenue of over R3 billion within just the first quarter.

In its approved 2020-21 special adjustments budget, the electricity revenue budget stands at over R2.6 billion.

Kritzinger claims the root of the problem is mismanagement and the incompetence of the municipal leaders, who did not even use the grants available to uplift the community.

The lack of maintenance has subjected the Vaal community to at least 25 years of poor service delivery.

Emfuleni says although the outages are primarily a result of old infrastructure, residents are also to be held accountable for the municipality’s financial crisis due to not paying their rates and taxes.

“Municipality receives grants [from government], not for replacing old infrastructure, but to expand new infrastructure projects, which is not enough.

“We have citizens that don’t pay, so most of the money ends up covering for daily services instead of being used for its exact purpose,” it says.

There still seems to be some “light at the end of the tunnel” for the Vaal community.

Kritzinger has confirmed that the Golden Triangle Chamber of Commerce continues to engage Emfuleni on sustainable solutions to restore power.

“We are working closely with Emfuleni to see where we can upgrade certain substations. We are also trying to get our own private funding to work with the municipality.” –

The municipality is cutting us off intentionally