Irate residents of Fortgale in Mthatha which falls under Ward 6 of the King Sabata Dalindyebo (KSD) Municipality met with a delegation of senior officials from the municipality on March 28 seeking answers following days of electricity blackouts in their area.
Residents say they have not had electricity in their area for half of March, with electricity outages lasting as long as five days in some instances.
KSD Municipality has blamed the outages on damage to an underground electric cable which was caused by companies installing fibre internet cables in the area.
The electricity has since been restored, although residents say electricity outages were a constant occurrence, even before the fibre cable installation.
Fortgale resident, Ayesha van Staaden, said the electricity blackout had a very negative impact on their daily lives.
“Our safety was compromised by the electricity outage, as batteries for our security alarms died within the first 12 hours of the outage.
“We also incurred losses in terms of groceries and damaged electrical appliances,” she said.
“We hope to see change after meeting with municipal officials and we will be holding each municipal department accountable for the promises they made at the meeting,” Van Staaden added.
“People of Fortgale had a black Christmas due to power outage that lasted for an entire week, and we lost thousands of rands as a result as we had to throw food away,” said resident Dumisani Gwadiso.
KSD Municipality general manager for electricity, Bantu Gwadiso, admitted that they were caught unprepared when the underground electric cable damage happened, which led to a prolonged electricity outage.
Residents have further given KSD Municipality officials a list of 23 grievances they need to be speedily addressed in their area.
These included installation of restriction signs to prevent big trucks using the residential road as a bypass, illegal dumping, cattle roaming the neighbourhood, illegal occupation and trading, poorly maintained storm water drains and street name signs among others.
The municipality promised to attend to the grievances but stopped short of giving timeframes on when the grievances would be addressed.
