Long-term solution to power cuts needed

For how long will people moan about service delivery before something fundamental is done to deliver the necessary services at an acceptable level? If it is not bad road surfaces, it is electricity interruptions and general lack of services.

If you happen to live in Enoch Mgijima Municipality you must brace yourself for all of the above at the same time.

The roads are not in any condition to even be called roads, rubbish collects on street corners and empty land everywhere and the less said about electricity the better, as it is an ongoing disaster.

If your area gets just two weeks of uninterrupted electricity you count your lucky stars, because the next outage might be just around the corner.

I am in a Whatsapp group for my ward and the complaints about electricity are a dime a dozen. No hour goes by without someone complaining about electricity interruption. This past week a whole area had no electricity for almost a week, something, sadly, that is no longer a surprise here. A fault was only discovered almost three days after the electricity went out and then no work was done until Monday.

So in reality the whole area had no electricity for a full five days. Can you imagine having no electricity for that long?

Our lives are so dependent on electricity to cook, keep our food from rotting, warm ourselves on these cold winter evenings and to light our houses. Our alarm systems depend on electricity so for five days the houses in that area were vulnerable to break-in.

The food in the fridge would have had to be eaten within the first two days. The five days without electricity would have meant forking out money on a daily basis to either buy readyto-eat meals or to prepare for that day only. This is a very expensive way to live and we all know South African households are creaking under the weight of the runaway food prices and record levels of unemployment.

Do you think these problems and many others faced by the residents keep the people in charge awake at night trying to find solutions to them? Do you hear of emergency summits between the politicians and residents to try and chart a way forward towards a functioning municipality in our lifetime?

Is there a short-term and a long-term master plan to solve these issues once and for all?

What could be solutions to these electricity outages?

Electrify the informal settlements and make them part of the formal grid and install electricity boxes in each.

Source funds to upgrade the substations to be able to carry the added load. Employ suitably qualified electrical engineers so we do not have to commission an outside contractor every time there is an outage.

Surely, these ideas are not that complicated, but why are they not being implemented?