Pimville residents block voting registration amid year-long power outage
Tensions ran high on Saturday and Sunday morning when Sun Valley residents chased away IEC officials and banned anyone from entering the Pimville Primary School.
No on-site voting registration took place over the weekend in Pimville Zone 7 as Sun Valley residents blocked the entrance to the registration site.
Tensions ran high on Saturday and Sunday morning when Sun Valley residents chased away IEC officials and banned anyone from entering the Pimville Primary school, which was set to serve as a voting registration site in the ward for the 2021 Local Government Elections.
The area has been without electricity for just over a year following a transformer bust in late August last year. Since then, they have had to endure a cold winter, poor quality of life and have gone as far as burning their old furniture to use as firewood, all this while trying to survive through the harshest global pandemic in recent history – covid 19.
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“The people are frustrated and they feel they are out of options because, honestly, how could a place be left without electricity for a whole year while the rest of Soweto has electricity? To this day no one has provided a concrete response or date as to when the power issue in Sun Valley will be addressed,” a community leader told Soweto Urban.
Predictably, the stance to block the entrance was met with very little to no resistance as Ward 22 residents appeared to be in a collective agreement that they would not register, and many felt the effort to register online was futile without electricity.
“People who have been neglected for a whole year, are suddenly asked to vote. It is not fair. Even online registration is pointless because there is no electricity here,” he added.
Kliptown police arrived and managed to quell the rage amongst locals through consultations with community leaders. The station’s Captain Hitler Ngwenya called for an alternative solution.
“We arrived to find a tense situation and have engaged with leaders here to urge the community to find alternative means. It is important that the public understand that blocking this site is limiting the chance for people to exercise their right to vote,” Ngwenya said.
In June, Eskom had said that their technicians were not safe in the area and that residents had made the situation worse by tampering with Eskom infrastructure. The residents, however, have dismissed both these claims as false excuses. The power utility could not provide an accurate date as to when electricity would be restored in Sun Valley.
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