Durban — While eThekwini Municipality aims to clear its backlog of complaints, residents in Durban are frustrated over the delay in repairing street lighting.
IFP councillor in eThekwini Dr Jonathan Annipen said he drew up a list of non-functioning lights in Phoenix, north of Durban, and presented it to the city in May, but no action had been taken nor has he received any response via email from heads of departments.
Annipen, in an email to a city official, wrote that he was acutely aware of the budgetary and other challenges the city faced and that it may not be possible to have all these repairs completed at once, but he was disappointed that he was ignored for three months.
Active Citizens Coalition (ACC) councillor Imtiaz Syed said the municipality remains saddled with widespread street light outages that have persisted for several months without any forthcoming solution.
Syed brought up the matter at a eThekwini full council meeting recently. He said while exploring reasons for such long-term outages, the ACC has established that there is a high rate of vandalism and theft of municipal infrastructure.
Syed said this included the stripping of electricity cables that power street lights and in some cases the bulkheads were even being stolen.
“Add to this the issues of water meters that are being stolen almost daily, along with guardrails on the highways and byways.”
Syed said while streets and highways are left in darkness one of the more serious concerns is the rise in criminal activity.
“The items being stolen can only have a black market for financial gain. The circle will perpetuate until it is broken by way of the municipality’s intervention. Theft and damage to municipal property is a disease and a crime that clearly cuts into the city’s financial strain that has a direct or indirect impact on all of the city’s activities and responsibilities.”
In response, ANC councillor Zama Sokhabase said the city had a backlog of 30 824 job cards but this number included duplicated complaints that have been logged by more than one person on the same street.
Sokhabase said 68% of the complaints were attended to depending on having the required material, trucks and personnel.
“We need law enforcement to curb infrastructure theft and vandalism in the city. We need a budget of about R200 million for a street lights contract for a period of 24 to 36 months,” Sokhabase said.
Daily News