Durban — The uMngeni Local Municipality and the Zenzane community near Nottingham Road have reached an agreement to install prepaid electricity and repair old infrastructure in the area.
This after residents took to the streets and blocked the R103 refusing to allow municipal workers to start with the installations on Saturday.
The area has not had electricity since Friday after the transformer broke down.
Ward councillor Sandile Mnikathi said they discovered that 70% of the residents had tampered with the electricity, thereby causing an overload.
“The area’s transformer has been continuously tripping and costing the municipality so much money as they had to do the repairing. We then decided to do check-ups from house to house. In those that gave access we then realised that most of them had bypassed the electricity,” said Mnikathi.
He said the community had previously agreed to allow the municipality to install the meters.
“In this case, people are made to pay the reconnection fee. However, we had also agreed that we were not going to charge the residents the fee as long as they would start paying for electricity. Yet on Saturday, the service providers were turned away,” Mnikathi said.
Mnikathi further stated that the municipality was then forced to cut the electricity connection until the residents agreed to the initial plan of paying for electricity.
During a meeting, community representatives assured the municipality that they would be allowed to do their work from Tuesday.
Meanwhile, mayor Chris Pappas said the municipality has had numerous public meetings engaging with the community. However, during the week, residents decided to chase municipal workers away with weapons.
Pappas said the electricity would not be restored in the area until residents allowed the municipality to continue with the work of installing metres and replacing infrastructure.
He said they had also helped to register people for free basic electricity.
“If we continue to restore electricity where there are illegal connections, we will violate national electricity laws and risk the safety of our employees. We apologise for any inconvenience caused,” said Pappas.
Daily News