Hundreds march in Khayelitsha to demand that Eskom re-open its service centre
Protesters say they were not consulted
Hundreds of people marched through the streets of Khayelitsha to Eskomās offices on Thursday, demanding that the power utility reopen its service centre. Photo: Vincent Lali
Hundreds of angry Khayelitsha residents marched to Eskomās offices in the area, demanding that the power utility re-open its service centre.
On 28 June Eskom closed its service centres in Khayelitsha and Bellville in Cape Town. This meant that customers in these areas had to rely on pop-up offices and the online fault report service, Alfred the Chatbot, to report problems or query bills.
On Thursday, residents marched under the umbrella of the South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO). Marchers shouted: āāEskom vulaāā (Eskom, open) and carried placards that read: āBring back Eskom officesāā and āAttend to our referencesā.
Zoleka Makhananda, secretary of SANCOās Hector Pieterson branch, said the closure had made residents ārevert to old ways of livingā such as cooking on paraffin stoves. āEskom closed the offices without consulting residents,ā she said, adding that there was no fast way for residents to log faults.
Resident Nothamsi Hlekiso said she joined the protest because her electricity box has not been working for four months. āI have four different reference numbers, but Eskom still hasnāt attended to them,ā she said.
Hlekiso is forced to use her old age grant to buy paraffin to cook and buy candles to light her shack. āI have no money to go to Eskom offices in Brackenfell,ā she said.
Ward councillor Lucky Mbiza said he had been getting electricity complaints from residents which should be going to Eskom.
āEskom officials told residents to report faults to us and get us to send their complaints to them. We are not Eskom employees. Now residents take their anger out on us and insult us when their complaints are not resolved,ā he said.
One area had been without electricity for three months now, he said.
In its memorandum of demands, the community demands that Eskomre-open its centre in the area immediately and attends to queries and complaints āpromptly and efficiently to avoid further inconvenience and frustrationā.
The protesters also want new meter boxes for fire victims and shack dwellers in new and old informal settlements to stop illegal connections.
They gave Eskom until next Friday, 9 August to respond to their demands.
Trisha Da Silva, from Eskom Western Cape, accepted the memorandum and promised to respond.
Next: Anger at huge jump in Zimbabwean passport price
Previous: Joburg community plays cat-and-mouse with City Power over illegal connections
Ā© 2024 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.