By ‘Odidi Matai-Sigudla
Cable theft and a lack of light could not stop angry Ward Eight community members from gathering in the dark Wesleyan Methodist Church for an emergency community meeting on 16 May, to find a solution to the “big problem.” In attendance were municipal representatives, Makana municipality’s electricity distribution manager, Xhanti Bokwe; DA Ward Eight councillor Cary Clark; DA councillor and caucus leader in Makhanda, Luvuyo Sizani; Makhanda Business Forum chairperson Richard Gaybba; community activist and professor Philip Machanick; Makana police station commander Colonel Pika; Hi-Tec and Smhart Security companies, and the community policing forum.
Clark led the meeting, saying that cable theft had “gotten to a point where it is now out of control, and it’s almost every other night that we’re seeing this (cable theft) happen. The big problem is that this municipality does not have the funds to keep replacing something that’s going to keep getting stolen,” Clark said.
“What has made this so much worse is the issue of load-shedding because apparently these guys work during load-shedding times, and they cut the cables then,” says Bokwe. “So the municipality at this stage, has now run out of the funds that were allocated for poor maintenance. You must, on a daily basis, use those funds to get the cables, and we are not winning,” Bokwe added.
However, Makhanda Business Forum chairperson Richard Gaybba disagreed. “It’s not that Makana [municipality]doesn’t have the money. It’s that Makana doesn’t choose to spend its money correctly. Since 2014, National Treasury has been saying ‘here’s a financial recovery plan. This is how you do your budget; this is how you do things’. And it’s not directed at you in your individual capacity, but as council as a whole, you’ve failed. In that very report, it speaks of the parlous state of the electrical infrastructure. Now unless Radu [Mzomhle Radu, municipal electricity manager] and Bokwe have the resources to do their job, they cannot do it. So council has failed, and failed badly.”
“In this city,” Gaybba continued, “we are allowing people to trade in other people’s livelihoods. We need to take a stand, and we need to develop bylaws that either outlaw the sale of non-ferrous metals. We need council driving that, proposing a bylaw, and until we have that, we are playing a fool’s game. They are meant to serve us, not themselves.”
Sharing murmurs of agreement, another community member said it was unfair to expect residents to pay rates only for the municipality to say they had no money to repair essential services. “The first thing that needs to happen is whoever the spokesperson is or whoever is in charge was supposed to come here and give us an apology,” the resident said.
Sizani pointed out that because residents are on the receiving end of cable theft and experiencing electricity cuts, it is the residents who should take action. Colonel Pika added that people could continue to complain, as they had been doing for some time but “what we need right now is a solution. We need to come up with solutions, how best to implement what is called neighborhood watch”.
Following this statement, community members began discussing possible solutions that could be put in place, suggesting that scrapyards trading in stolen cables be identified, and petitions taken up for them to be closed down.
“We are not the Holy Spirit. We are not everywhere,” Colonel Pika pointed out. “You people are everywhere because these things are happening around your houses. You see these people. We are living in a modern world. You can take a photo and bring it to the police”, he said
The Methodist Church’s Reverend Otto Ntshanyana said “the very fact that we have so many people who have attended this meeting, shows that people are really concerned about what’s happening. This is our city, and we need to protect our city,” Ntshanyana stated proudly. “We can win this war when we work together.”
A representative of Hi-Tec Security added that everyone in the town needed to work together to find a solution. “It’s not just our town, our city of the saints. It is all the towns. Black, White, Coloured, whatever, doesn’t matter. We are all together as one unit. All of us,” he said.
