Residents of Emily Hobhouse Street stop traffic in demand for stable electricity supply
The second evening of protests sees a significant escalation of community frustration.
Residents of Emily Hobhouse Street refuse to sit quietly and be consumed by darkness.
The short-lived restoration of electricity in the street was met with dejected outrage on the morning of February 16. When the dreaded silence returned after the morning load-shedding block, thoughts immediately returned to their forced method of expression, vowing to turn the voltage of their tempers up several notches from the previous 24 hours.
Residents began gathering outside their complexes around 17:00 and by 17:30 had coordinated their reserved rampage, marching purposely toward the busy intersection. Easing into their protesting stride they began creeping into the road before one brave woman upped the ante and parked her vehicle diagonally across the Nic Dierderichs Road. Emboldened, two young men then added their vehicle to the barricade and before long a third had helped to partially block the road.
The crowd may have been whipped into a frenzy but they remained conscious of the dangers, protesters taking turns to orderly direct traffic around the obstacles. Traffic was reportedly backed up to where Paul Kruger Road meets Christiaan de Wet Road, while motorists were inconvenienced and some frustrated, the majority sympathised, displaying their solidarity with hooters and fisted salutes.
Placards reading ‘We want power’ and ‘No more load-shedding for Wilgeheuwel’ were amplified by chants mirroring that basic messaging. By 18:30, the current had returned to its sockets, but residents persisted for several more minutes to not let the point fade.
The street was calm by 19:00 but with City Power confirming two of the four high voltage cables that feed the area were out of service, stable and prolonged service is precarious.
The people behind the reference numbers
Tito Zibi is one of the many residents whose homes double as their primary office. Tito had a business call with a client in the United States scheduled for 19:00 and while he may have just been able to honour that, planning is a tough task. Just last week during the suburbs’ weekly intermittent outages, he claims he lost out on a deal worth R20 000 because he was unable to submit a proposal on time. That business went to someone with a stable electricity supply.
Johnny Real is a diabetic that had his right foot amputated several years ago and requires daily insulin shots which need to be kept cold. Eight days of little to no electricity left Johnny with heightened stress at not being able to take his life-saving medication at the required temperature. Warm insulin could force Johnny’s blood to clot; the anaphylactic shock was postponed only thanks to kind neighbours who allow Johnny to periodically plug his fridge into their generator.
Sally and Gareth Castle listed the ubiquitous complaint of exorbitant food wastage among their biggest gripes. The Castles noted multiple-day outages in the last two months forced them to replace the contents of their fridge at least four times in that period. One of their neighbours noted how she was able to claim R5 000 from insurance for load-shedding losses which while a reprieve, affects her insurance profile.
Elsu Gericke brought her patio chairs to the streets declaring ‘I will sit out here until the power comes back on’. Demanding action from her ward councillor. Elsu stated her belief that Wilgeheuwel and the rest of Ward 97 should be exempt from load-shedding until the network was sufficiently able to do its job. She stated how she was so disillusioned with the Democratic Alliance that she would consider voting for anyone else.
Angela Crowder and Adele Sherriff are among the most vocal social media reporters of the suburb’s electricity woes. Any outage comes with their reference numbers and requests for feedback. They also direct their bemusement to their ward councillor and are upset at having been blocked and removed from social media groups. Having denied being rude or combative, all they ask for is to be accurately informed.
Maladze Makhosi has been the chief coordinator of the controlled chaos and before marching to the main intersection, listed the three demands of the people. The restoration and prolonged resolution of the outages were top of the list with the guarding of key power points being another demand. The most applauded was the demand that the ward councillor make himself available to the people.
The taxing labours of Ward 97 Councillor Jacques Hoon.
For any suburb, the unofficial complaints department and the first target of the community’s verbal volleys is the ward councillor. In the past few days, councillor Hoon compared the messages on his phone to the graphics on a slot machine, illustrating the speed with which the volume of messages races across his screen. Adamant that he strives to address every issue by using the channels available to him, he explained that he would not tolerate abuse, rude language and personal attacks on social media.
Also read: https://www.citizen.co.za/roodepoort-record/2022/04/16/ward-97s-infrastructure-conundrum/
It must be stressed that councillors do not have the authority to command any action from any of the City of Johannesburg entities. They act to escalate service delivery issues and advise entity managers, mayoral committee members and the Mayor of actions that require attention. In summary, they represent the community they serve, oversee the ward-specific Integrated Development Plan (IDP), vote for bylaws and implement policy formulation within the context of the City council.
Addressing accusations around political party promotion, Hoon admitted that he was a proud DA member and believed that if people voted with the same gusto that they protested, Johannesburg and the country as a whole would be better off. He sighted that in this ward, only 53% of those eligible voted, believing that if that number was closer to 100%, it could have a significant impact on the seat allocation in the council.
The sense of community and feeling of satisfaction at attaining a positive result may be intoxicating but Hoon stated there was no direct connection between the protests and residents having their power restored. The electricity supply may continue to be inconsistent but a community has now found their voice and when left with few other choices, will remain peacefully vociferous.
