Ready for a war with the public?

Spare a thought for the folks over at City Power.

At some point, when they were turning off the power to Alex’s Riverpark, somebody had to be asking, “are we over due process?”

There appears to be a lot of he-said-she-said about the situation, so one can understand the relative frustrations, but turning off a whole community’s electricity seems an intensive intervention.

I can imagine there would be a number of illegal connections in Alex, as there would be in any area.

Whether I’d go as far as believing that every connection is illegal would be a stretch. Being convinced that some people in the community have legal connections and are paying their due (as well as their neighbour’s), it would be quite unfair to lump them in and cut them off too, no?

But what is City Power to do otherwise? Play The Beatles and let it be?

Cutting them all off

I would have thought they’d go full DA and run to court, but not even.

Tjoops lol soz, there goes your power Riverpark.

I don’t know if that’s mafia or ninja, but it certainly doesn’t feel quite so constitutional.

It’s the landlord locking you out of your flat for not paying rent. It’s the school denying your kid entry because you haven’t paid fees. It’s the kind of self-help we’ve been legislatively insistent on preventing, and here we have it from City Power.

So what is this? Is this okay now? Have we given up on trying to be nice to the non-payers, takers and system-by-passers? Have we accepted that it’s not cool to take advantage of your neighbours and their payment consistency and honesty?

Is Riverside going to be without power until the community invites City Power back in and provides them with some community security to conduct inspections?

ALSO READ: WATCH: What happened when City Power cut illegal connections in Alex

Rushing to court

It seems like a push in the right direction. It’s annoying and unsustainable to run to court every time one needs to push the right agenda, but that’s what we’ve been forced to do in so many instances.

And yes, it is to protect the poor from abuse, and yes, that is a great thing. It’s not a great thing to, in the same instance, empower the poor to abuse the system.

That may sound pretty elitist, and it probably is. What’s not elitist is to look around and see that allowing abuse of the power grid to go on so long has brought us to this mess, where, unfortunately, it’s going to take an ugly intervention to resolve…likely many ugly interventions.

ALSO READ: City Power crackdown on illegal connections met with resistance in Alexandra

Will others follow?

What’s scary is that City Power is alleging that they’re doing this because the community prevented them from conducting their local operations. The community’s response was the typical, “No, we didn’t.”

It was nothing more than a distant protest. City Power played the safety card, and it’s amazing how far you can get with that.

If this is allowed to persist, and at length, would other local electricity entities take a lead from it?

Cash-strapped municipal power distributors and even Eskom must be licking their chops watching this, wondering how and where they can apply it.

It doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to determine which communities are going to get hit hardest if the power is shut off where there are many illegal connections and non-payment.

If you take something away from somebody that they’ve been getting for a long time, you’ll have a fight on your hands, especially if it’s done en masse.

We’ll need some serious intervention on this matter because the self-help may work once or twice, but if you’re going to turn off the lights now, make sure you can deal with the results.

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