Faizel Patel, Radio Islam News, 2014-07-01

“We are in the business of supplying electricity and not denying anybody electricity.” These are the words of Louis Pieterse, the spokesperson for City Power as he addressed furious residents from Lenasia, south of Johannesburg on Tuesday afternoon.

Angry residents demonstrated at City Power offices in Lenasia demanding answers to the recurring power outages, illegal connections and cable theft that have plunged the suburb into darkness in recent days.

As Pieterse tried addressing the large number of Lenasians that turned up to voice their anger and frustrations, residents at times baited Pieterse and other City Power officials.

The abhorrent behavior of the residents eventually resulted in the meeting being moved to the boardroom of City Power offices where a memorandum by the selected residents of Lenasia was handed over to Pieterse.

Pieterse said that being once the area manager of Lenasia, he was aware the suburb has always been plagued by power outages and illegal connections in Extension 9,10 and 11 and its nothing new. “At that stage it was already a problem.”

“The chief whip (Prema Naidoo) called a meeting yesterday where we discussed exactly this Extension 9,10,11 problem, and it was agreed that he would take it further through the political structures to the MMC to see what can we do so that we avoid Thembelihle residents illegally connecting to Extensions 9,10,11.”

“So that’s something we working on very hard now and we will have to go back and look at budgets and look at options on how it can be done, if the mayoral committee gives the go ahead to do it,” added Pieterse.

Pieterse said they would have more visible security in the area until they reach a permanent solution to the problem of illegal connections and also highlighted the revamp of the Nirvana substation to deal with increased capacity avoid future power outages.

“Lenasia has grown tremendously. Nirvana substation which is the substation that feeds most of Lenasia is an old substation. We’ve recognized it and put it in our capital expansion programme and a contractor has already been awarded for Nirvana substation to be upgraded,” said Pieterse.

Pieterse said they expect the work to the upgrade of the Nirvana sub-station to be completed by the middle of next year.

“In the process we will install brand new power transformers, we’ll remove all the old switch gear, put in new modern technology switch gear and the substation will basically be new, that will deal with growth issues and loading issues going forward,” Pieterse said.

(Twitter: @Faizie143)