“Here, in Fochville, some houses have permanent load shedding. On the WhatsApp group we belong to, they said it was because of a faulty transformer, and we just have to accept it. No one wants to listen to our problems. Our electricity went off at midday yesterday and never came back on. We were stuck without electricity for four days last week,” an extremely frustrated resident of Maple Street on the eastern side of Fochville complained on Wednesday morning.
Meanwhile, residents of the far western side of Fochville and Greens-park also complained that they never have electricity due to municipal infrastructure problems.
On 14 April, residents of Greens-park closed the road past the town with burning tyres because they had not had electricity since the previous load shedding.
“We understand why Eskom does load shedding and that the municipality cuts our electricity every second day because of the low payment, but why is our electricity off at other times too?
During a meeting with the municipality last year, they said the transformer at the RDPs was over- loaded. They said they would come and remove all the illegal connections and sort the problem out, but they never came,” says one of the protesters, Mr Patrick Mokwena. The other protesters echoed his views.
At the same time, residents of numerous streets in the central part of Carletonville, like Ada, Ida, Beatrix, Gypsum and Gold streets and parts of Annan Road did not have their electricity supply restored after load shedding either.
Meanwhile, ratepayers in the area of the Bloukrans Street substation on the eastern side of Carletonville as well as Oberholzer were stuck without electricity due to municipal cable theft during load shedding.
Residents of several parts of Welverdiend and Watersedge were without power again too, also due to cable theft and cables that burnt and the municipality could not replace within at least a day.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, residents of Khutsong Extension 5 also blocked the road between Carletonville and Welverdiend due to electricity problems.
Thieves have started stealing electrical cables in some areas, almost every time there is load shedding.
They are emboldened by the Merafong City Local Municipality, which has not cut the grass in most open spaces, nor has it fixed the broken street lights for years.
As a result, members of the Community Policing Forum (CPF) in Welverdiend started a campaign on Tuesday to get residents to buy solar-powered street lights, at least, to make it more difficult for the criminals to strike.
“The CPF comprises of members of the community who do volunteer work to help keep criminals away. There are just not enough people willing to help with such patrols. We hope this new initiative will help to deter the cable thieves, somewhat,” says Mrs Wena du Plessis of the CPF.
Meanwhile, the municipality only provided vague answers for some areas on what was going on with the infrastructure problems that had led to the power cuts and what it was doing to address the problems.
