Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Thembi Nkadimeng has revealed that municipalities lose billions of rands to fix infrastructure that is damaged during load shedding.
Nkadimeng said there was an increase in vandalism and cable theft cases when there is load shedding.
She said the South African Local Government Association undertook an assessment of damage to infrastructure when Eskom is implementing power cuts.
“The frequency and intensity of cable theft and vandalism of infrastructure during load shedding is so high that 12% of the surveyed municipalities recorded over 100 incidents per day per load shedding period. The overall cost for fixing damaged and stolen municipal infrastructure and equipment during load shedding amounts to R1.6 billion over the 89 municipalities for 2022/23 financial year. The cost to fix damaged Waste-Water Treatment Works, Water Treatment Works, and to procure back-up generators and diesel across the 89 municipalities was R1 406 445 056.
“The total loss of revenue due to unserved energy from municipalities was in excess of R21 billion per annum for all municipal licensed distributors. Municipalities were incurring R1 107 583 200 per annum on staff overtime and contractors due to repairing electrical infrastructure in addition to the normal cost budgeted for the overtime and service providers,” said Nkadimeng.
Nkadimeng, who was replying to a written parliamentary question from DA MP Jacques Smalle, said there were several reasons why municipalities are not able to protect their infrastructure and this includes governance and other challenges.
It was easy for criminals to target municipal infrastructure because they know load shedding schedules in every town.
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