BETHAL – The final that ignited the fire in Bethal residents was when Govan Mbeki Municipality’s electricians refused to switch the town’s power back on because they had not been paid their overtime.
This resulted literally in fire last week, when the community of Bethal and eMzinoni came together and stood up for their rights. They have had enough of GMM’s many excuses for not supplying electricity to the town.
Angry residents set tyres alight two evenings in a row. They blocked off the Kerk Street intersection on the N17 through town on the first evening, but this escalated on the second evening when the residents blocked off all the town’s entrances with burning tyres.
The entrance on the N17 from Trichardt, as well as those from Hendrina, Standerton, Ermelo, Middelburg and Kriel were affected.
Residents and business owners were determined for their voices, frustrations and anger to be heard.
“I pay for all my services! I pay for electricity which I never have, I pay for refuse which never gets collected, I pay for water which is now going to be throttled because of our municipality’s non-payment to Rand Water.”
“I receive high electricity bills for what… we don’t even have electricity most of the day,” said an angry protester.
From the beginning of March up until now, residents had to endure constant electricity interruptions and at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. These outages can range from several hours to days.
GMM claimed the lack of electricity over the past several months, was due to poor payment of debt, exceeding the Notified Maximum Demand (NMD) which in return resulted in implementation of rational load shedding (this besides the national Eskom load shedding), overloaded or damaged infrastructure such as transformers (resulting in fires and explosions), stolen cables or illegal connections, and even apartheid.
Ms Thandi Ngxonono, executive mayor, responded to the calls of angry residents, on Thursday, 20 August, and agreed to meet with selected representatives from the community of Bethal and eMzinoni.
According to a reliable source, bad infrastructure was the main reason for the electricity situation, after much debate it was eventually agreed that the electricity outages were due to non-payment to Eskom.
According to the insider, the mayoral management was unable to provide an answer to the monthly consumption of electricity by Bethal residents.
However it was said that out of the R2-billion GMM owes for the Eskom debt, of which R112-million is Bethal debt, this is just more than five per cent of the Eskom bill.
It was said R12-million a month is paid by Bethal residents which includes various services such as electricity, water, refuse and sewage.
The mayor, municipal manager and the director for Technical Services and his team Continues from Page 1 of senior officials sent out a press release stating that a series of items were discussed which included the outstanding debt for Bethal, the Notified Maximum Demand (NMD), electricity challenges, the Eskom and Rand Water accounts, load shedding, illegal connections, schedule for rotational load shedding, refuse removal and roads.
“The meeting was conducted in an open and transparent manner despite the fact that there were heated moments which were robust but progressive.
“The meeting made a plethora of proposals, suggestions and best practices with a view of to find possible and workable solutions for all the challenges that GMM is currently grappling with.”
Mr Ziyaad Dangor, chairman of the Bethal Business Association (BBA) and spokesman for Bethal & eMzinoni Community for Services (BECS) said: “Legal action will continue from our side. This is the only long term solution to benefit Bethal.”
Although having no involvement or being associated with the protest action last week, Mr Dangor said the public need to understand protesting is only a short-term solution.
“The mayor was abrupt at the meeting when a question was brought forward to her about the auditing financial statements being released and why it was not made available for public viewing.
“She responded that this was not the meeting to discuss that matter and not on the agenda.”
Mr Dangor said an estimated amount of R280 000 has been raised to date towards legal proceedings.
A local resident proceeded with opening a case against GMM at the police station on Saturday, 22 August.
