PIETERMARITZBURG residents who have suffered financial losses as a result of the power failure in the city for the past few days, can claim for them from the municipality.
Municipal officials said yesterday that those wanting to claim should make sure their grounds were legitimate.
“Don’t expect us to honour your claim if you have not bought electricity for the past three months,” municipal manager Madoda Khathide said.
Khathide and mayor Mzimkhulu Thebolla held a media briefing at the City Hall yesterday to update the city’s residents on the work being done to restore power. The power outages are as a result of a storm on December 15 which led to a substation fire.
By yesterday, thousands of residents were yet to be reconnected to the grid and the municipality said it hoped that it would be able to connect them by December 24.
The city called for patience, saying their staff members, together with external contractors and Eskom staff members, were working long hours to restore the power.
The delays in restoring the power infuriated many who took to social media to complain. Some of the residents have been calling for the mayor and his executive to be forced out, accusing them of mismanaging the crisis.
The Msunduzi leadership said they were aware that thousands of residents, many of them poor, had food items spoil because of the power outage.
Khathide said the claims would be processed and handled with the municipality’s insurance company.
He warned that the claims would have to be factored into the budget, meaning they might lead to an increase in rates charges for residents in coming years.
“Claims will be processed in terms of the agreement that we have with the insurance company and will be assessed by them,” he said. He said in the past they had rejected many claims because the claimants were dishonest.
“As we sit today there are a lot of people that are still buying and submitting claims. They are buying today, they are submitting claims today and this incident occurred on December 15. So we will do an assessment and look at the size of your fridge; can it accommodate the whole slip (of goods claimed)?”
Khathide claimed dishonesty by members of communities was partly to blame for the damage to the substation.
He said the city together with the Development Bank of SA had conducted an assessment of the infrastructure and found that members of the community in the northern areas where the incident occurred had tampered with electricity infrastructure.
Those responsible, he said, were not residents in informal settlements but community members that could afford to pay for power.
Thebolla said the municipality spent R700 000 each year to deal with illegal connections. “Equally, there are things that are impossible; we remove these illegal connections and in two hours they are back. There is that (group) that the municipal manager is referring to, those that are well organised; they don’t connect from one post to the informal settlement, they will go and tamper with our infrastructure to gain access and use more electricity and pay for less.”
THE MERCURY