Olievenhoutbosch goes week without power

Frustrated Olievenhoutbosch residents set a huge fire on the R55 road on Monday morning in a service delivery protest.

Angry resident Stanley Monara said they have been without electricity for the past six days.

Monara said the community could no longer tolerate the lack of service as it was paying for it like all other residents.

“Imagine having no electricity for a week, with no communication from the municipality. We buy food and if that food gets rotten, no one will replace it. All we are asking from the municipality is to bring back the electricity.”

He said it was bad enough that they had to tolerate load-shedding.

Sylvia Skhosana of ward 77 said the local ward councillor had not indicated why the area was without power.

“It’s day seven today and we don’t have electricity and I can assure you none of the residents here in our community have the slightest idea of when supply will be restored.

“Olievenhoutbosch is forever being treated like a second-class community. Our municipality doesn’t care about us,” said Skhosana.

However, ward 106 councillor Kenny Masha told Rekord that communities in both ward 77 and 106 have been informed of the power outages, adding that all the relevant information had been shared with the community from day one across all community communication channels.

“The residents have been informed from day one by the councillors of wards 77 and 106. Extension 36 falls under two wards.

“We’ve also been engaging with the community in person where repairs were taking place and also area committee members of ext. 36, who have been with us at the repairs site since last week Wednesday at most times until the early hours of the morning,” said Masha.

He said the reason why residents have been without power was due to faulty cables from the Kentron substation.

“Unfortunately, all the repairs were found to be faulty after they were done.”

Earlier this year, Olievenhoutbosch residents had accused the city of abandoning the community’s service delivery needs.

They claimed the maintenance of roads and electricity infrastructure was not up to scratch, while rubbish was not regularly collected.

Meanwhile, city emergency spokesperson Charles Mabaso said the fire on the road was reported early in the morning and logged as a grass fire.

“Firefighters arrived on the scene to find cardboard boxes on fire and extinguished them. No injuries were reported,” Mabaso said.

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