While visiting various neighbourhoods, members of the Freedom Front Plus (VF Plus) caucus in the Tshwane Metro Council concluded that infrastructure damage and power outages, more prevalent since the beginning of the month, cannot be attributed solely to stormy weather.
Years of maintenance backlogs and the failure to frequently prune trees on pavements and along power lines are major contributing factors to the crisis.
In Villieria and surrounds in the Moot, the recent storms uprooted trees which damaged power cables.
Although the electricity supply has been restored to some neighbourhoods, residents and businesses were without power for nearly a week.
In Kilner Park, vandals damaged infrastructure during the outages, causing repairs to take even longer.
In Waterkloof, uprooted trees damaged not only power cables, but also vehicles.
The party also visited Valhalla and surrounds in Centurion, where residents’ power was only restored after nearly a week.
During the oversight visit, numerous Metro teams were seen repairing damaged power lines, but there is a massive backlog due to a serious staff shortage.
The Freedom Front Plus sincerely thanks the workers for their efforts to restore power as quickly as possible despite the immense workload and staff shortages.
During the oversight visit, the party collaborated with business owners to provide food and water to the workers and support them wherever possible.
The Freedom Front Plus implores the City of Tshwane to revise its disaster-management plans so that repairs can be done faster and more effectively.
In the long term, the Freedom Front Plus also wants to see trees pruned before the rainy season to prevent needless damage and power outages in the future.
In addition, the Metro needs more workers – not managers – to speed up grass-roots service delivery.
The Freedom Front Plus will keep a close eye on the damage and repairs, and support Metro workers by any means possible.
