Exasperatingly, the residents of Phalaborwa were left without power for an entire weekend. This was allegedly because of a cable that blew on Saturday morning, the 16th of April. This, coupled with the heavy rains experienced over the weekend, meant that there was no respite for the already downtrodden residents. Those who could, resorted to generators to keep their fridges running.
The power was only restored on Monday, the 18th of April, after a lengthy struggle to deal with fuses and overhead cables that blew in one of the substations. These power outages are far from novel, in fact they have become somewhat the norm. The narrative of the modern day local municipality is filled with acceptance of service delivery failures, decaying infrastructure and inept appointments.
In no other way does this become more apparent than by taking a walk through the pothole-filled, overgrown pavement-lined streets of Phalaborwa. It is a municipality governed by a mayor that would turn to corporate entities to maintain her infrastructure rather than seek a workable solution to repair the rot within her own council chambers.
It is a municipality which cannot function without the assistance of private organizations.
A member of Let’s Change Phalaborwa, Rodger Ferguson, said that they have expressed their concern to the municipality at the decaying state of the water, electricity, road, and sewerage reticulation infrastructure and their incessant failures resulting in a health and environmental catastrophe and are willing to work with the municipality to help fix the town.
“There are a lot of people in the community who have a lot of skills such as engineers, accountants, auditors, and the likes so we can put together an advisory committee to consult the municipality to change Ba-Phalaborwa, but they refuse to answer us. We want to help fix the municipality, and we want the politicians to engage us,” stated Ferguson.
Moreover, the community is now sick and tired of the bad, reckless, and dysfunctional governance of the municipality that they have said that they will try to re-engage the mayor and if she refuses, they will look at alternative plans such as seeking to place the municipality under section 139 Administration or take the municipality to court to force them to govern responsibly.
“Or we will take over the provision of these services as has happened in Makhanda, Harrismith and Koster to name but three municipalities,” he concluded.
