This followed Ward 117 councillor Tim Truluck slamming the city council’s execution to load shedding last weekend, describing its communication plan as ‘shambolic’.
MMC for Environment and Infrastructure Services, Matshidiso Mfikoe, acknowledged the concerns about its communication regarding load shedding but said the municipality was only able to provide the information that was available to it.
According to Truluck, the City Power load shedding web page could not be opened by particular browsers, the website indicated that there was no load shedding for two out of the three days when in fact load shedding was being implemented.
“For most of Sunday it [the website] did not have any load shedding information; residents did not know that the schedule from Saturday would be repeated on Sunday; areas that were under load shedding on Saturday were also under load shedding on Sunday and no communication was issued to ward councillors.”
He added that on municipal communication platforms such as city council’s official twitter account, which did communicate information to the public, there was not sufficient information provided.
However, Mfikoe clarified that, “City Power does not load shed; it is an Eskom-driven process… City Power cannot be held responsible for Eskom’s internal issues.”
“If Eskom does not give us information in the time then how do we give information to our customers? That is one of the things we need to talk to them about and correct with them.”
According to Mfikoe, Eskom typically provided the municipality with load-shedding schedules, which indicated when load shedding would take place.
However, Eskom only announced the forced power outages at about 4pm on 21 November when they were set to implement the outages, despite previously denying that it would be load shedding, Mfikoe said.
Mfikoe said problems arose because Eskom announced it would be load shedding on 23 November when in fact there was no schedule for Sunday and as a result used Saturday’s schedule on the day without communicating this.
“We need to realise that Eskom has its own issues. We need the customers to understand that some of these things are way out of our control. I agree that we need to communicate in time the proper information, but that is only dependent on whether we have proper information from Eskom.”
Mfikoe noted that there were problems accessing City Power’s website, adding that in her personal capacity she could not access it using her cellphone.
However, she said these issues had been addressed.
The council would be engaging with Eskom to establish a better communication strategy and more effective ways of executing load shedding, Mfikoe said.
Meanwhile, City Power has since said that it would use its twitter account to update customers about future load shedding programmes.
For updates about load shedding in the City of Johannesburg follow City Power on twitter @CityPowerJhb.
