Power cuts, workers’ go-slow hit voting day

Despite being promised by Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan that there would not be power outages on voting day, certain parts of Gauteng suffered power cuts yesterday.

On the eve of voting day, Eskom released a statement which said the power utility would continue to attend to reported outages.

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“The delay in attending to the reported network faults was exacerbated by the fact that some of our technicians had embarked on a go-slow, further extending our turnaround time to restore supply,” the statement said.

National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) general-secretary Irvin Jim said the go-slow was a result of workers refusing to work overtime.

“Management realised that there is money they paid wrongly to workers but they have not explained to workers and unions how this happened. What they did was to deduct the money from workers’ pay and workers reacted by not working overtime,” he said.

Jim added the union noted Eskom’s response about paying back the workers.

“Workers want to know why they took the money unilaterally in the first place and we also want a commitment that they will not deduct it again because management says they will still deduct [the money] in future but in consultation with individual workers,” he said.

The statement added Eskom continued to restoring power supply to affected areas although the turnaround time took longer due to the backlog.

“We can confirm that Eskom management met the trade unions and the labour matters were resolved with the agreement that technicians will resume their duties,” the statement said.

Numsa spokesperson Livhuwani Mammburu sang a different tune and said the union knew nothing of the go-slow.

“There is no go-slow. They must stop blaming our members for the problems that are happening there. Our members were never on a go-slow,” he said.

City Power also issued a statement which explained the power supplier was attending to the affected areas as swiftly as possible.

City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena added the power supplier received 1,500 open calls for outages yesterday morning and 650 were from Randburg.

“The power outage occurred at around 2.54am. The cause of the power outage has not been established and the affected areas include Bromhof, Bryanston, Ferndale and North Riding,” he said.

Mangena added the outages were due to cable theft and also affected the Edenvale Hospital and Tarantal voting station.

“Five suspects were arrested,” he said.