After threats of a strike planned for Tuesday, the 26th of April, by the masses of Ba-Phalaborwa, the mayor Merriam Malatji stepped in and intervened. The communities of Ba-Phalaborwa have, over a long time, been complaining about the state of their electricity which mostly left them in the dark, sometimes for days at a time.
However, seemingly at the tipping point, Malatji stepped in and held a meeting between her municipality, Eskom, and representatives from community at the municipal council chambers on Tuesday, the 26th of April.
The meeting was facilitated by Malatji in a quest to resolve the power outages in Mashishimale, Boelang, Maseke ward 10, and Selwane Ward 18 and 17 and it was resolved that the power outages would be tended to during the month of June 2022.
Malatji has also called for the re-launch of the Community Police Forum (CPF) to deal with cable theft. “A WhatsApp group should be created to improve the level of communication between Eskom, Ward Councillors, and the community with regard to receiving updates of power outages,” stated Malatji.
The meeting also resolved that Malatji would engage with the Gerson Molapisane, Mayor of the Tzaneen Local Municipality in a bid to resolve power outages in the Selwane area.
This also came on release of the most recent IDP draft budget participation meeting led by Malatji. This was a budget residents of Phalaborwa vehemently objected to, stating that there was no plan by the municipality to adequately address the extreme service delivery and infrastructure failures of the past decade.
According to Rachel Longster, the chairperson of the Let’s Change Ba-Phalaborwa, they made it clear to the mayor that they rejected the draft budget in its current format.
“We called upon both the Ba- Phalaborwa and the Mopani District Municipalities to review their budgets and make provisions to fix the decaying and broken infrastructure. We noted that despite an overall budget of some R685-million, nothing was set aside in the proposed 2022/2023 budget, nor in the projected budgets for the subsequent two years, to fix the most basic of services: the failing water and sewage infrastructure, the decaying road infrastructure, and the failing electrical infrastructure in wards 11 and 12,” stated Longster.
