Note to Editors: Please find English and Tswana soundbites by Cllr Themba Fossi here and here
While the mayor of Tshwane, Nasiphi Moya, is congratulating herself on social media, large parts of the city are being crippled by recurring power outages.
Soshanguve, Garsfontein, Queenswood, Heuweloord and Lynnwood have all suffered prolonged outages in the past few weeks. This is compounded by a generally slow response time by officials to councillors’ queries.
Although some of these outages are unrelated, they seem to have become worse since the explosion at the Njala electricity infeed station in February.
After the repair of the collapsed power lines on the N4 highway that occurred in 2023, the city was sent to reconnect its lines to Nyala. But no allocation has been made for this in the mayor’s budget adjustment.
The project would have cost R25 million, but enormous allocations were made to water tankering and watchman security contracts instead. To date the mayor has not made any effort to defend these allocations.
Since the damage to the Nyala lines, a large part of the city’s power supply has depended on the Kwagga infeed station in Pretoria East. R5 million was on the budget to do upgrades at Kwagga, but the ANC-led coalition voted to take this money away.
In Tshwane’s Centurion/Olievenhoutbosch region the director of electricity was suspended for not following ‘proper protocol’ in communicating with councillors.
While councillors in this region have never been provided with such a protocol, we have always understood that our job is to find out what is going on, to relay this information to the public, and to push for a resolution.
The mayor has been notable in her avoidance of electricity related issues, preferring to do health inspections at Pick’n Pay supermarkets. Maybe it’s time for her to attend to the full rage of her duties, and to support ward councillors desperately trying to relay information to communities.