Pretoria - Home owners from Saulsville, Atteridgeville, are no longer willing to sit back and allow dwellers from a nearby informal settlement to continue illegally stealing electricity from their homes while they are left footing the bill.
Broken glasses, rubbish, rocks blocking roads and burnt electricity poles were left in the aftermath of a clash on Wednesday morning between residents of the informal settlement and home owners about the illegal electricity connections.
Schoolchildren were prevented from going to school while public transport and private vehicles were blocked from travelling between the two sides.
Clashes were said to have started the previous night when informal settlement residents protested when home owners started cutting off the illegal connections they had made.
The informal settlers were said to have started throwing stones at homes and setting fire to the electrical poles they had formerly used to connect their shacks to.
Johanna Ramahuma, whose home was left with broken windows and holes in the asbestos roof, said the squatter camp people just started throwing stones into her home, hitting her 12-year-old niece in the process.
“They started attacking us at about 8pm and shouting that if they could not have electricity in their homes then neither would we (home owners),” she said.
“Our windows and roofs are ruined and more so my television set and microwave were also damaged in the process,” said Ramahuma.
She said home owners had been struggling with the illegal connections made by the informal settlement dwellers since 2012.
Despite informing their councillor, nothing had been done to stop them from making the connections, she said.
“We have tried everything we could think of to stop them from connecting illegally but nothing has been done.
“We even sent a memorandum to the Tshwane Metro Police Department to try to get them to intervene but our councillor didn’t show up there,” said a visibly upset Ramahuma.
Her sister, Jennifer Ramahuma, said she did not understand why they had decided to attack their homes but was glad her daughter, Boitumelo Malebe, 12, was not badly hurt by the stone that hit her.
“I ran to get help from the neighbours when they started attacking our home so my daughter and her older siblings stayed behind.
“The rock hit her on the hip. She isn’t too badly hurt but traumatised by this,” she said.
One resident from the informal settlement side, who refused to be named, said they also deserved to have electricity.
“They are the ones who started this problem because they didn’t have electricity on Monday but we were still lit because of the illegal connections so they decided to remove our wires,” said the young woman.
“Yes we burnt the poles but for them to block our children from going to school because of our issues on electricity is taking things a bit too far now,” she said.
SAPS spokesman Captain Bonginkosi Msimango said the police were in the area and were monitoring the situation.
Pretoria News