It has been reported earlier that there are a huge number of households and businesses that are connected illegally. The number of people has increased and many people share electricity from the limited number of transformers.

The residents all over Qwaqwa, Harrismith, and Kestell are feeling the same discomfort. The businesses of these three areas from the municipality are also collapsing and many of the employees are forced to stay at home as there's no production.

Last week on Friday, the Moteka substation, which has 32 villages, stopped working at around 16:00. The residents who receive electricity from this substation spent the whole weekend in the dark. Electricity was only being restored for the residents on Monday (yesterday) in the afternoon.

The circumstance left the residents with no trust in the municipality anymore, especially since this happens often. 

Speaking to OFM News in an exclusive interview about this matter, one of the residents Tshediso Mohale said, "I don't trust our municipality at all. Those people (municipal employees) are getting monthly payments for loitering around with the vehicles that were bought by taxpayers for nothing." 

Connie Mofokeng, another resident, referred to the municipality as the “dead municipality”. Mofokeng says the municipality has collapsed completely. “How can normal healthy people like us spend the whole weekend without electricity and no one from the municipality is finding us a solution!” she shouted.

The municipal spokesperson, Thabo Kessah, said the technical team of the municipality tried everything to keep communication effective with Eskom. “Our technical team had been in contact with the Eskom technical team over the weekend until they came to switch on, on Monday.”

Kessah adds that this means the affected parts had their power restored a little bit later on Monday.

He further pointed out that the residents need to be aware that some other works of repairing the substations are the commitment of the Eskom technicians before theirs (municipality technicians) start working on the problem.

Nonetheless, speaking to OFM News yesterday evening, the  Eskom provincial spokesperson, Stefanie Jansen van Rensburg, said a fault in the municipality's network tripped their transformer earlier on Monday. "At this stage, our network feeding the substation is live but they cannot energise customers because of a fault on their network."

Jansen van Rensburg said they are not the electricity distributors in the area.

The municipality is currently owing Eskom more than R7 billion.

OFM News/Tumelo Khotha