Protesters Demand Eskom Address Power Outages

Residents of Soweto staged a protest at Eskom’s headquarters in Sunninghill on 9 June to show their unhappiness about blackouts.

Dozens of angry residents came in buses and minibus taxis to demand the end of power outages in their area.

Community leader Nhlanhla Mohlauli said residents were tired of delivering memorandums of demands to the apparent unsympathetic management of the power utility. “This is not the first time we come here to share our frustrations with the management of Eskom,” he said.

“That is why today we decided not to write a list of demands but introduce a delegation made up of people from different parts of Soweto that will work with the utility to address issues of blackouts in our communities. We don’t want a middleman in the form of political representatives between us and Eskom.“These people [the delegation] will take our grievances to Eskom and bring feedback to the community. The power outages that we’ve been going through for 13 months now must come to an end. We are tired of being treated like stepchildren in our country, electricity is a basic need.”

Eskom’s spokesperson in Gauteng, Amanda Qithi said they would meet with the delegation to address their grievances. “We will go back to different value chains within Eskom so that we can decide on a date on which we can meet with the delegation and deal with the issues that will be raised in that meeting,” she said.

Qithi admitted that the utility was currently facing a backlog of issues that was caused by an overload of the network due to illegal connections in Soweto.

“We definitely do have a backlog due to overloading into our network. There is a lot of failure on our transformers because of illegal connections. We constantly replace transformers that were supposed to be replaced after three years,” Qithi added.

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