The residents of Eldorado Park barricaded roads with rocks and burning tyres on Thursday to protest against the ongoing blackouts and the delay to restore power to the area after a local substation caught fire last week.
A generator that was meant to provide short-term relief also broke down, leaving the residents helpless and in the dark for over a week.
The protest in Eldorado Park is the latest in a string of communities taking to the streets to voice their anger against outages as a result of loadshedding and also due to incidents of cable theft.
Others that have protested include the residents of Pimville in Soweto and those in Riverlea, who also spent the Easter weekend in the dark.
The fight against cable theft made headlines this week when Kgomotso Diale was shot dead by suspected cable thieves during a march by the residents of Pimville to Chicken Farm informal settlement, one of the rumoured hotspots for cable theft.
Reports show that there has been 249 incidents of cable theft since the beginning of March this year.
On Wednesday, radio personality Penny Lebyane was seen on social media standing in solidarity with enraged people of Pimville after the police ordered them to move away from the Diale household, where they had gathered to show support to the mourning family.
Lebyane said: “I had been inside the Diale household and had spoken to Kgomotso’s mother, so I did not understand why the police were overzealous, telling us that we should move because as far as I am concerned that is a family home, not a crime scene.
“My mother has been living there for over 25 years now, many other grown women who are over 60 live there and most of them do not have husbands, so their sons go around patrolling at night trying to protect the community.
Lebyane added: Kgomotso was not a useless person, he was a part of the Community Policing Forum that made sure that people are safe in the morning when they go to work, and they fought against cable theft.”
On Wednesday, Police Minister Bheki Cele visited Pimville and promised to add 10 police vehicles to the existing fleet in a move to improve police visibility in the area.
“The community is hurt and traumatised because one of them is no more. Some fear for their own lives because if they are too vocal, they are not guaranteed safety. So, we hope that the police will add those cars and do patrols,” said Lebyane.
In Eldorado Park, the residents took it upon themselves to ensure that the burnt substation is protected. On Tuesday, a group of residents’ search for cable thieves yielded results when 11 suspects were apprehended.
The suspects were found near the Kliptown Primary School in Soweto.
City Power’s spokesperson Isaac Mangena said they feel bad that the community [of Eldorado Park] has to go through more days without power and ensured that work is under way to restore power to the area.
“Overnight the team conducted further tests on the transformer and concluded that it can be fixed on site and loaded again. Repair work can take a day,” said Mangena.
“Once this is done, we need it to float for a minimum of 12 hours before we can gradually load customers by tomorrow [Friday] afternoon. Worst case scenario is the one advised by the technical team that conducted initial assessments yesterday [Wednesday], which will take at worst seven days.”
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