City Power employees are allegedly too scared to enter Princess informal settlement to dissemble illegal connections because of threats made to them on previous occasions.
Part of the settlement falls under Ward 85. Councillor Carl Mann said it is something he and Ward 71 councillor Gert Niemand receive “constant” complaints about and have reported on numerous occasions, only to hear city employees are afraid of the residents.
This comment comes after photos of numerous illegal connections in Princess informal settlement were sent to the Record by an angry resident. The photos clearly show where the illegal connections are made, how they’re made, how they’re wired back to the shacks and the ‘grid’ in which they’re connected to the shacks.
Resident Johann Marx who took the photographs posed the question, “If it looks like this at every informal settlement in South Africa, how much electricity is Eskom and our municipalities actually losing, and who’s paying for it?”
The answer is the residents pay, Mann told the Record, and to this end he motioned to have paying residents in Grobler Park and Lindhaven reconnected to a separate, more removed substation and disconnected from the ever-troubling substation on Van Der Linde Street. This move is to prevent electricity theft at the substation near the temporary housing affecting paying residents.
The project is near completion and Mann invited the Record to the site on Thursday 2 July to see their progress.
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