Perspective: The streetlight effect

When you drive or walk home at night you choose the route that is best lit, avoiding streets shrouded in darkness. This is getting harder and harder to do in Ballito and Salt Rock with more than 424 street lights out of order at last count.

If this is the case here, it makes me wonder how many lights are functional in Stanger and the rest of KwaDukuza.

How the issue of streetlight maintenance is such a recurring problem is beyond me.

Streetlights are largely a fixed part of our municipality’s infrastructure. The bulbs will last for a predetermined length of time, then other unplanned faults will occur on a regular basis and finally new street lights are being installed.

Once you have all the variables its boils down to a maths sum. You have to have the manpower to address a certain average number of faults per month, with some wiggle room. You either do or you do not. It boils down to planning.

Now in the past KDM has put the maintenance of streetlights out to tender.

In 2015 we reported that ElectroTech Electrical and Nationwide Electrical were the two companies which had won the street lights tender in 2014 and they – according to the council report- were doing a sterling job.

Which begs the question, if in 2014 and 2015 it was necessary to award the job to not one, but two, external companies, how is it that three years later the municipality suddenly finds itself on the back foot with an enormous backlog of faults and nobody on the payroll to do the job?

In April we quoted electrical department executive director Sibusiso Jali saying the main reason for the slow turnover of street light repairs and maintenance was a lack of manpower: “Our challenge right now is that we have only two people servicing the southern half of KDM (from Ballito to Tinley Manor and inland to Shakaskraal), so we are severely understaffed,” Jali said.

I can then only assume that the tenders came to and end and were simply not renewed.

The municipality is also rumoured to have bowed to pressure from unions to keep the work in-house to create jobs. But that would have required more people to have been hired to do the work and clearly that was not the case.

That said, after a year of campaigning (hats off to the Ballito and Salt Rock neighbourhood watch teams for all the work they have put into the cause) a new contractor is about to be appointed and ahead of this KDM have committed to starting the repairs required in ward six, 21 and 22 as of yesterday.

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The streetlight effect:

A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together.

After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park.

The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, “This is where the light is”.