The Democratic Alliance in KwaDukuza has noted with concern, the growing crisis of extended power outages that threatens to bring the local economy to a grinding halt. Despite the ongoing requests from elected ward councillors to get credible feedback, there appears to be a glaring unwillingness from officials to comply.
In the absence of officials being willing to take communities into their confidence, we have written to the Executive Director for Electrical Engineering, Sibusiso Jali, to request information and transparency on the following:
• The causes of these extended outages and why teams supposedly do not have the requisite tools to undertake repairs.
• Compelling reasons for a beyond 24 hour repair time on a faulty or tripped cable.
• The role of senior managers in terms of being appraised on the status of repairs.
• Whether the Electricity Business Unit has capacity to ensure reliability of supply to an economic node at the cusp of the Easter season.
We have further noted a frequency in outages since a moratorium was placed on overtime and have therefore asked for further reassurance that the network is not being compromised or sabotaged by any entities with nefarious intent.
The DA has a plan, as contained in our recently launched Provincial Manifesto, to rescue KZN from power outages and the DA in KwaDukuza will not sit back and watch politically connected employees bring the lives and livelihood of our people to their knees. While the ANC in KwaDukuza uses their limited days in government to plunder public funds, we will ensure that cadres placed in strategic permanent positions are held to account.