A SECURITY indaba hosted by the City of Tshwane on Tuesday will hopefully be a turning-point in the fight against widespread vandalism that continues to ruin municipal infrastructure.
This was expressed by mayor Cilliers Brink during the summit, which attracted different stakeholders from the security industry who explored innovative ways of securing service infrastructure belonging to the municipality.
Among those in attendance were representatives from Vodacom, the CSIR, the SAPS and the Tshwane Metro Police Department cable theft unit led by MMC for Community Safety Grandi Theunissen.
Participants deliberated on vandalism of critical water and electricity infrastructure and key municipal assets.
One of the main objectives of the indaba was to solicit the assistance of the private security industry to safeguard critical City infrastructure.
The gathering was hosted on the back of a recent call by the City for residents to help in safeguarding municipal properties.
Water and electricity networks have been under attack due to criminal incidents of cable theft and vandalism, stifling service delivery.
Damages to infrastructure, according to the City, put a huge financial burden on the City’s already stretched budget.
Brink said: “Every time a substation gets attacked and stripped of copper, it affects supply of electricity to communities but it also weakens our infrastructure, so that we spend most of our money just repairing damage instead of maintaining what is there.”
He further expressed hope that the summit “will be a turning-point” in addressing some of the security challenges exposing the City’s infrastructure to criminality.
Last year in July, a security guard stationed at Njala 132KV substation in Pretoria west was gunned down during a cable theft incident, resulting in power outages for residents.
MMC for Utility Services Themba Fosi previously suggested that the national government made “the substations national key points so that they can be safely guarded and be able to supply stable electricity to our residents”.
In April this year, a valve that regulates and controls the flow of water to Ekangala and Rethabiseng areas in Region 7 was tampered with in what was described as an act of sabotage.
The valve tampering delayed water restoration to Rethabiseng after residents were without water for weeks at the time.
Meanwhile, Brink this week announced during #TshwaneYaTima campaign at the security estates in Rosslyn and Akasia that the City lost R1.7 billion owing to non-technical electricity losses last year.
“This is the theft of electricity, breaching of meters, tampering with meters, administrative errors and so forth. But the lump sums of that are folks who use electricity but then don’t pay.
“But what we have seen is it’s not the poorest of the poor that do this. It is very often folks with a Porsche in the garage who simply make an illegal connection and think that it’s fine (because) it is a victimless crime,” he said.
He warned those illegally using electricity that they would face criminal prosecution in addition to disconnecting their illegal connections from the grid.
Pretoria News