Reiger Park community concerned over electricity theft

Frustrated residents of Reiger Park are calling on municipal officials to urgently deal with the electricity crisis in their township, before the fed-up residents take matters into their own hands.

Speaking to the Advertiser, legal and paying customers in the area, including their Ward 34 councillor, Charlie Crawford, said the township has for the past couple of months been experiencing unplanned power outages due to overloading and infrastructure damages caused by izinyoka (illegal connections).

Complaining residents expressed their shock that the brazen electricity thieves have gone as far as to steal electricity from municipal-owned property the Reiger Park Civic Centre.

When the Advertiser visited the township, illegally connected electricity cables could be seen running from the electricity box in the civic centre to some of the shacks and old mine hostel in Joe Slovo informal settlement.

“I’ve been inundated with complaints from residents who are paying for their electricity, and I escalated the matter to the municipality, asking them to take swift action against power thieves in the township.

“However, they have not done anything to remedy the situation,” said Crawford.

According to Crawford, the illegal connections on the electricity box inside the civic centre and other spots in the township result in overloading, damages to the infrastructure, which constantly plunge the whole area into frequent darkness.

“The power frequently goes out as the network overloads because of too many illegally connected homes in the informal settlement using a network which is designed for a certain number of paying households.

“In some cases the boxes explode because izinyoka have bypassed the installed fuses or circuit breakers that switch off when the load gets to dangerous levels, thus preventing the transformer from exploding.

“Not only are this damaged transformers costly to repair or replace, but they take hours or days to repair,” explained Crawford.

The councillor reiterated that part of the problem is that the City of Ekurhuleni has broken its promise to electrify all informal settlements in the City.

“A lot of promises we made to the community of Slovo during the mayoral election campaigns in Ekurhuleni, but none of them have been kept. These promises include re-blocking and providing legal connections to the informal settlements,” said Crawford.

This article first appeared on Boksburg Advertiser and was republished with permission.

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