Residents appeal to mayor

RESIDENTS of Ivory Park last week shared their frustrations of prolonged electricity blackouts by Eskom with City of Joburg mayor Mpho Moerane, in their appeal for a speedy resolution.

Moerane and his mayoral committee team, accompanied by City Power, had taken the city’s accelerated service delivery programme to Rabie Ridge, Ivory Park, in the north of Joburg, following complaints of up to 40 damaged Eskom transformers not repaired for five months.

The Ivory Park oversight visit came a day after Joburg signed a new power purchase agreement with the privately-owned Kelvin Power Station, to increase the City’s capacity to supply electricity to the north-eastern suburbs, such as Greenstone, Kew, Lombardy East, Alexandra, Melrose, Rosebank and Houghton.

Speaking during the inspection of damaged transformers in Ivory park, the mayor said: “The complaints expressed by residents relate to Eskom’s failure to respond to customer service queries and not attending to reports of either vandalised or damaged transformers …

“The residents have indicated that they are not against paying for electricity. However, they were concerned that Eskom does not respond to their customer queries,” he said.

The residents further accused Eskom’s senior regional technician of being biased towards poor communities in Region A in favour of affluent areas where they pointed out that customer response turnaround times would never be five months.

Moerane, who took time to engage residents on the affected streets in the township, said, among the complainants, were elderly women who said they were not in debt to Eskom, but they too were subjected to living in darkness for months, and that their calls to repair their damaged transformers had fallen on deaf ears.

He explained to residents who approached him during the oversight visit that the main cause of the damage to the transformers was also overloading due to properties with back-room tenants serviced by a transformer with a limited capacity.

The residents, who compared their electricity plight to that of Soweto, also complained that they could not afford the R6 000 reconnection fee demanded by Eskom.

They felt this was unfair as they were ignored by Eskom and only given attention when they marched to its head office in Megawatt Park.

Moerane acknowledged the residents’ complaints but told them that they, too, must play their part and do away with illegal connections that were overloading transformers.