Numerous houses and businesses in the north of Pretoria were plunged into darkness after a large number of cables were stolen on Monday night.
Businesses and a block of households between Jan van Riebeeck and Koos De la Ray and Gerrit Maritz streets suffered the outage.
Deputy chairperson for Pretoria North CPF sector 2 Nikki De Jager said the perpetrators evaded capture.
“Thieves waited for the patrol team to move to the other street then they quickly cut the cables, and we missed them by seconds as they fled the scene.
“We need more hands in terms of patrolling; we plead with the community to stand up and join because we won’t be able to win alone,” De Jager said.
She said it’s hard for them to catch the thieves because of limited resources while the Tshwane metro police (TMPD) cable theft unit was not helping in the fight.
De Jager told Rekord that the community is fed up with what it believes is a copper cable theft syndicate.
“Cable theft in this area is now getting out of hand and it is fuelling anger in the community.
“The outages are prolonged as it takes a while to replace the stolen cables.
“Essential infrastructure continues to be damaged owing to this, traffic lights are not working and power breakers burning, which causes transformers to explode – and the list goes on.
“It looks like the thieves have more rights than the community,” De Jager remarked.
She said the value of the cable stolen is unknown at this stage.
“It is hard to establish at this stage the amount stolen, but it is a large number of cables.”
Recently Rekord reported on a similar cable theft north of Pretoria where a local councillor said he believed there was a syndicate.
“I believe there’s a copper cable syndicate operating in the north,” said councillor Dehan Harmse.
“I think we are besieged by these thieves.”
Harmse told Rekord that the number of cables and water meter thefts in April was “staggering”.
“Thieves stole a huge amount of cables in April. This issue has serious repercussions in that essential infrastructure is being damaged.”
This has contributed to the regular power outages in the area, he said.
Harmse said the thieves use load-shedding and the cover of darkness to steal cables and water meters.
Harmse urged the community to be vigilant and encouraged anyone with info to contact the TMPD cable theft unit.
The TMPD did not comment at the time of going to press.
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