Emfuleni residents march to mayor’s office over power outage

Angry residents of Emfuleni Municipality, in Johannesburg, marched in darkness to the home of Mayor Gift Moerane on Sunday after they had been without electricity since Friday.

The mayor’s spokesperson Lebo Mofokeng corrected reports on social media that residents had cut power to the mayor’s complex, saying that there had been a power failure before residents arrived.

In videos shared on social media about 100 residents can be seen marching towards the complex, where the mayor lives, demanding answers for the power outage.

Mofokeng told News24 on Monday that residents were still without power, but work to try to restore it was still underway.

“A team of electricians was sent out to access the damaged cable they found that the municipality did not have the capacity to fix the fault so a service provider was deployed,” said Mofokeng.

Mofokeng said that it was difficult to say when power would be restored as they had initially hoped the issue would have been fixed by Saturday.

On Monday #EmfuleniMustFall trended on Twitter with residents not only complaining about the power outage, but also ongoing water issues.

Meanwhile, Rand Water threatened to cut water pressure in the municipality by 20% due to no payment.

In an interview on eNCA on Monday, Moerane said that they would be going into negotiation meetings with the water service board.

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