Irked residents without power since last week Monday

Residents from Winternest in Akasia have been without any electricity since last Monday, March 14, due to a prolonged power outage in the area as a result of the ongoing strike by Tshwane metro workers.

“It’s sad that you look out at night and see the neighbours across the road having power while we have meat rotting in our fridges,” said Akasia Residential Forum chairperson Hannes Venter.

“Thousands of rands of meat, fruit and vegetables have already been disposed of. Residents are also spending several more thousands of rands on fuel for generators to try and make ends meet.”

Venter and the residents he represented said they were ready to take to the streets to air their grievances earlier this week, but halted their action after the metro requested that they allow them to restore their power.

Last Thursday, residents of Clarina, a short distance away from Winternest, blocked Daan de Wet Nel Drive with burning tyres over similar complaints.

“The residents were complaining about service delivery saying that they did not have lights for some days,” Akasia police spokesperson Constable Lindiwe Mabasa said.

While their power was restored a day later, residents of Soshanguve’s Block XX also blocked one of the streets leading to a primary school with a fire.

“They were blocking the routes towards the transformer,” Mabasa said.

The Tshwane metro has been marred by a service delivery backlog when some of its workers, believed to be affiliated to the SA Municipal Workers Union (Samwu), embarked on strike action over a wage dispute on Tuesday, March 14.

This led the metro to experience difficulty in restoring power to areas that were without power as it was mostly technical staff, like their electricians, who were participating in the strike action.

Tshwane mayor Randall Williams, during a TV interview, said that the situation was being exacerbated by some of the staff who were creating outages and preventing staff from executing their duties.

He said the outages were being created through the sabotaging of substations and stealing of cables while some employees were being physically hauled from their offices and others assaulted.

Despite the strike continuing for over a week thus far, Williams also said they were working to identify the workers who were involved in the acts of criminality through photos and videos they had gathered through the joint operations centre.

The joint operations centre, consisting of the Tshwane metro police department, SAPS public order policing unit, along with civil society and private security agencies, was established to restore order, putting an end to service delivery disruption and damage to property and infrastructure.

“We are now identifying these workers involved and, as soon as we properly identify them, we will dismiss them,” Williams said.

He further said that the only reason why some of the workers embarked on the strike was to place him under fire to agree to their demands.

“They want to present a city that is chaotic so I can agree to a ridiculous salary increase,” he said.

Speaking in a video on social media, Tshwane MMC for Finance Peter Sutton reiterated that they were working to identify the “criminals” who were on their system and part of the illegal activities, adding that they would “get them out” out of their system.

“We cannot allow criminals to destabilise this administration, attack our democracy and prevent us from executing our core mandate – providing services to residents,” he said.

Shortly after the strike started, Samwu distanced itself from claims that its members were driving the ongoing strike action in the metro’s regions.

“We just want to indicate that our members are not on strike. Anything that happens in the city is attributed to Samwu – any other person who is wearing a red T-shirt who can be seen in town marching or being involved in a particular action, those people are Samwu members,” regional secretary Mpho Tladinyane said.

ALSO READ: No cost estimates to property, infrastructure damage in ongoing Tshwane strike

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