MyPE

Community Business Directory, Event Listings, News and Views from Gqeberha, Nelson Mandela Bay

Electricity supply challenges in NMBM call for urgent intervention

By

Dear MyPE

Huge parts of the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality are currently experiencing electricity supply challenges. This could be ascribed to recent torrential downpours, stress on the city grid due to continued switching required by load shedding, outages due to the number of illegal connections and finally, due to the massive maintenance backlogs on a crumbling city infrastructure.

To exacerbate matters, the municipal employees of the electricity directorate who are affected by the Executive Mayor’s decision to scrap their scarce skills allowance to ensure a cash-backed budget, have embarked on an illegal strike. The DA warned of the consequences of this ill-advised course of action and our predictions have now come to pass leaving the residents to suffer massive inconvenience as a result.

The matter has now escalated to the level where the municipality is essentially being held to ransom by those employees. Complaints by desperate residents who have gone without electricity for days on end, fall on deaf ears.

The DA urgently calls on the Executive Mayor to resolve this stalemate and address the plight of our residents who have been without electricity for some days in this harsh winter. Should the strike not have been resolved by tomorrow, the DA will be bringing an urgent motion to council to resolve on the matter.

Our residents should not be made to bear the brunt of internal wrangling and labour disputes.

Regards

Jonathan Lawack

The following two tabs change content below.

Port Elizabethan

This author is a 'catch-all' for occasional articles and letters written to MyPE. The Author of each article can be found in the signature at the bottom of each individual article.