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ELM best friend of the cable thief?
Organised business has warned that ineffective security - costing R11 million per month - by the Emfuleni Local Municipality (ELM) is aiding criminal syndicates and directly delaying the fixing of municipal infrastructure and recovery of the Vaal economy.
The massive multi-billion-rand infrastructure and cable fixing “honeypot” of ELM and national Government is increasingly attracting the attention of ruthless criminal cable and transformer syndicates across Gauteng and beyond.
Cable thieves in Vereeniging as recently as Monday cut cables in Duncanville, paralysing local businesses in the area for 17 hours. And in the earyly hours of Tuesday morning, certain areas in Vanderbijlpark was also “powerless” when cables thieves struck there as well.
Criminals have now realised that neither ELM nor the national Government seem truly interested in securing infrastructure but instead simply replace stolen cables and transformers knowing they will again be stolen.
“ELM and national Government are the gifters that keep on giving to organised crime without doing what is necessary to prevent the situation, but they continue spending R11 million in ratepayers’ money every month on useless municipal security,” says Vereeniging Business Corporation (VBC) Director Kevin Jackson.
But ELM and the Provincial government pay very little real attention to the growing security problem and single most important threat to service delivery after municipal mismanagement and corruption.
Bad risk management and incompetent management by ELM are combining to prevent infrastructure improvement and that means service delivery will not take place, thus undermining investment and confidence in the Vaal – Guest writer Craig Kotze.
