Ballito’s Ward 30 councillor Jack Abrahams writes:

During the November Mayoral Imbizo, our newly elected Mayor, Cllr Ngidi, stated that he will come to each ward individually and listen to the needs of the residents. He said this will be a more pro-active way of listening to the needs of the residents of KwaDukuza as opposed to the current cluster system.

This festive season we have seen the electricity infrastructure collapse in most areas of the municipality but none more so than the three most visited wards of the municipality ie: Zimbali, Ballito, and Salt Rock.

These wards had numerous outages from the start of December till Sunday, 12 January when the Sheffield, Shaka’s Rock and Umhlali Golf Estate were hit by a blown transformer in Shakaskraal.

Some outages lasted from three to five days. Businesses lost income and residents lost food and appliances.

KDM established a task team to investigate some of these outages as rumours had then surfaced of sabotage. There were various theories including internal sabotage, sabotage by contractors and sabotage by former KDM staff. We await these findings or whether it was just the infrastructure that is collapsing.

We also trust that there would be accountability and recourse. The second transformer for the Dukuza Substation should be arriving soon and the start of phase two of the project. With the new sub-station and KDM going back to fix infrastructure and by-passing, we hope to have a better season for 2025/26.

Residents await the mayor’s return as promised in the November Imbizo so that we can get closure and assurance of a better sustainable electrical infrastructure. All 53.9km of Ward 30 were directly affected by these outages.

As the DA caucus, Privi Makhan has also written to the municipal manager for next week’s Lekotla to be held locally for cost containment and so that we can still play oversight over our wards and constituents.

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