Frustrated residents close down the road

Frustrated Honeypark residents in Honeydew brought traffic on Beyers Naude Drive to a halt after being without power for four days.

Residents flocked to the scene, burning tyres and obstructing the busy road with rocks and tree branches. “We want power, we want power,” was chanted by both young and old as they carried placards.

The SAPS and JMPD were on the scene trying to control the protestors.

Resident Mark Menteath explained that they were without power for four days and it looked like City Power wasn’t going to do anything anytime soon.

“We were frustrated for not having electricity, it felt painful not knowing what to do and seeing your staff in the fridge get spoiled. You just feel that you need to do something, and someone had an idea of the road closure.”

“Everyone felt as if that is all we can do to make an impact. In my life, I never thought I should go protests for the services that should be delivered to me.”

Residents also confirmed that this was not the first time they had this problem in Honeydew. It is constant, cables are being stolen more often and residents are left with no power.

” It’s like every two weeks we get an outage, and it is frustrating, and it is pointless phoning the ward councillor because he won’t reply, and City Power is just as useless. We looked at other options and we decided this is what we needed to do to take things a step further and it worked for us.”

Menteath explained that the protest wasn’t because of lawlessness they just felt that they needed to do something as a community to try and improve things.

“What other options have we got except to go in the streets and voice our opinions, because nobody is listening, caring, or doing anything. I never thought that one day I’ll be out protesting for the services that should be ours.”

Residents found the City Power team working on the site and waited for them to fix, finish and switch back the power.

Isaac Mangena, City Power spokesperson, said that were aware of the outage as they had a lot of calls coming in from customers.

He added that the protestors kept one of their operators behind until the other team came back from testing.

“They did call for assistance, they were a bit shaken by the protestors, but nobody was harmed and there was no violence. The outage was caused by cable faults and the main unit had burnt out. We had to get the material ordered and new faults were located. The delay was because of ageing infrastructure, cable fault and cables being stolen.”

He added that the residents were informed regularly regarding the outage.

The councillor for Ward 97, Jacques Hoon was repeatedly contacted by the Randburg Sun, telephonically and via WhatsApp, for comment regarding allegations from residents that he doesn’t assist them when they reach out to him regarding the power disruptions.

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