Illegal connection in Witpoortjie area leaves residents frustrated
Residents found illegal connection cables running along the railway to where it is connected, and pulled it out just for residents from the informal settlement to reconnect during load-shedding.
Acts of desperation for electricity in a nearby informal settlement cause upheaval in the daily lives of paying electricity users as residents of surrounding areas said that foreigners who live in the area connect unauthorised electricity to their homes in Princess.
These illegal cables run from Boshoff Street and along President Road and the informal settlement is situated near Austalorp Road, Princess.
Johannesburg City Power has been brought in to address the issue and said that illegal connections are unfair to paying customers as their power gets interrupted frequently due to ‘non-payers who overload the system, which ultimately causes it to crash’. This causes inconvenience to all the households and businesses that pay for their electricity.
“Illegal connections destroy photocells which control streetlights. This contributes to a strain on the network as streetlights stay on all day,” Isaac Mangena, City Power spokesperson said in a statement issued on 27 June.
Residents are fed-up and said that people are connecting illegally without thinking about how they are endangering other people’s lives.
“With the open cables at the park and children running around and playing there, this poses a great risk while also damaging the road as they have dug open and buried the cables from the pole across the street. Not just that, some people also use the railway to walk across and with the tall grass, they cannot see the live open cables. The municipality needs to make all illegal connections their priority to disconnect these cables,” resident Sophia van Deventer said.
City Power strongly emphasises that illegal connections are unsafe.
“When people illegally connect to the grid, they are putting their lives and of others [especially children] at risk. These illegal connections are resulting in a lot of cases where the network is malfunctioning, the trips increasing, cables burn, lower or higher than the normal voltage on the network, and in other instances have caused fires in private homes of residents,” the power utility’s statement read.
The issue is affecting the railroad network as well, and a spokesperson for PRASA, Andiswa Makhanda, cited that they were not aware and that they will send their technicians to establish if there is indeed an illegal connection.
Residents also cited that PRASA also needs to clean the railway section for it is not safe for the residents that live in the streets next to the railway as ‘thieves hide in the tall grass’.
“We will send our technicians to establish if indeed there is an illegal connection. If there is one, our technicians will with immediate effect disconnect the connection,” Makhanda said.
While residents have embarked on numerous investigations to find out where the cables start to where it ends and despite their efforts to disconnect these connections – during load-shedding – according to a resident, the cables are then re-installed.These cables are hidden from plain sight with trees and leaf branches along the train tracks in a deliberate attempt to hide them from passersby.
While PRASA is aware of the safety implications this has on residents, the railway network agency said that this is unacceptable.
“It must also be stated that the subject corridor is due to receive major rehabilitation work in preparation for the train service resumption earmarked for later this year. Once again, we would like to thank you for bringing this to our attention,” Makhanda said.
City Power said the proliferation of these illegal connections adds strain to the network and infrastructure and attributes this to the increased number of people seeking economic opportunity in the city.
“… As such you find that many of these individuals do not have adequate accommodation when they come into the city, and they set up in informal settlements across the city. On the last count, we had over 250 informal settlements across the City of Johannesburg, a number which has likely increased in the past few months,” Mangena said. And continued to say that is a serious problem that manifests from the Department of Human Settlements as people need housing, therefore end up in informal settlements and consequently connect illegally to the grid.
The utility added that they are committed to safeguarding and protecting its network and infrastructure against acts of criminality and ‘will work with law enforcement agencies to curb such’. They also call on the community and businesses to combat such acts and to participate in their community programmes to safeguard electricity infrastructure.
Details of the full programme are available on City Power’s website.
