DA launches Take Back Your Power campaign in Ekurhuleni
The metro, by its own admissions, suffers more than 1 500 unplanned outages a day
Due to constant and lengthy power outages in Ekurhuleni, the DA in the metro launched its Take Back Your Power campaign via a virtual press briefing on Tuesday morning.
Considering that the City of Ekurhuleni is the industrial heartland of Gauteng, thousands of jobs are being placed at risk by a municipality that is failing to meet its constitutional obligations; and when Eskom reintroduces load-shedding, it will further exacerbate Ekurhuleni’s pending economic collapse, said the party.
The DA said a crisis that started many years ago has reached breaking point with persistent electricity outages.
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“The metro, by its own admissions, suffers more than 1 500 unplanned outages a day, overwhelming its limited technical staff and leaving whole areas and sometimes whole towns without power for days on end.
“Further underlying factors include poor contractor management, winning bidders subcontracting out their work in violation of the law, electricity substations that are in a critical condition from not being upgraded nor maintained and area managers who rarely go on site to assist their teams.
“Problems also stem from underlying issues like underspending of budgets on priority repair and maintenance work, no monitoring system for overtime work done, poor HR systems to manage non-performing employees, and major electricity cables that are not repaired years after being logged as defective,” said the DA.
“The National Energy Regulator of SA (NERSA) estimates that municipalities on average spend 10 per cent of their salary budgets on staff for energy repairs, maintenance and reticulation, but Ekurhuleni spends just 3.7 per cent on this critical function.
“The City of Ekurhuleni recently admitted in Parliament to having been engaged in load-shedding practices despite receiving sufficient supply from Eskom. In some instances the DA has established that the claims of cable theft by the metro are used as a cover-up for the fact that there has been a lack of maintenance on high-voltage cables.”
According to the DA every hour of outage in the City of Ekurhuleni is estimated to cost R1.6-billion in lost economic output and hundreds of thousands of jobs are being placed at risk by a municipality that is failing to meet its constitutional obligations.
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In order to address this crisis, the DA proposes that:
• The standby team schedule for energy outages be shared on a weekly basis to all councillors.
• There should be rapid improvement of communication on outages, such as estimated restore times being communicated within four hours of the outage being reported.
• The same communication should be shared with the call centre management and on social media.
• A special task team should be convened, inclusive of national government departments, to investigate properties that are overloading the network because of overcrowding and illegal connections.
• In order to assist with illegal connections, the City should request assistance from the police and army to protect officials, City and private property. The metro should also investigate solutions to provide electricity or alternative energy sources to areas with illegal connections.
• All vacant posts should be filled in the energy reticulation department with an active shift-rotation system. This will reduce the amount of overtime required by the department and it will be a more effective way to spend the energy budget.
• A schedule should be published for energy rotational load-shedding to allow businesses and residents to plan in advance.
• The metro should share the budget and accurate progress reports on all projects for energy infrastructure to date and allow regular, in-person oversight visits to projects by councillors.
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