Ward 80 residents were invited to a community engagement by the City of Johannesburg’s Executive Mayor Dada Morero.
These residents included those from Rabie Ridge, Kanana, Sophia Town informal settlements, and New Hani section for an opportunity for their issues to be addressed by the mayor.
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Melody Hlatshwayo, Ward 80 councillor, thanked the community for honouring the invite from the mayor,. She told residents that she had been escalating their issues to the mayor, including not having water and electricity, bad infrastructure at schools, and having no houses.
Community members, from youth to pensioners, mentioned concerns such as unemployment, poor service delivery, lack of infrastructure in schools, and unresponsive police officers. Mthandile Madiba, a resident, came up to address the mayor, stating that they have been dealing with problems that no one had come to help them with
“This is not the first time we are having such a meeting where we expressed our issues about having no electricity with City Power, and yet there has been no change at all. Now that the elections are coming up everyone is forced to come to us and make us empty promises. So, I am here to tell you, mayor, that we need electricity, and if we don’t get electricity we definitely won’t vote too.”
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The mayor took the podium to address the community on some of the concerns. “We are trying to fix the issue of electricity. A transformer has been ordered, and the issues with it are that one transformer has to supply 2 000 households, so all those households are still being registered.
There is another problem, which is the informal settlements, because they overload the transformer, and illegal connections to the transformer are another cause of transformer explosions. We need your community’s help by avoiding all these things, especially when the new one comes in.
“Lastly, transformers don’t come immediately because a lot goes into getting them to the people.”
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