Author: Ntobeko Mangqwengqwe

In the past few months, cable theft has, according to the George Municipality’s Electrotechnical Services Directorate escalated to the extent where it seems like individuals are targeting or sabotaging the infrastructure of the Electrical department and this affects service delivery due to the incurred damages.

Vandalism of cable theft that has occurred in the past seven months cost the Municipality approximately R 1, 4 million for the work done, says Mr Bongani Mandla, the George Municipality Director for Electrotechnical Services.

“In this financial year starting from July 2023, we had 379 registered streetlights and cables that were vandalised and/or stolen up to the end of January 2023. These incidents leave areas in the dark and impact negatively on the security of the neighbourhoods and the provision of quality service delivery to the residents,” Mandla added.

Mandla says, the most affected area is the vicinity of the George central business district and a recent spike of incidents occurred at York, Palgrave, Skool, Cradock, and Meade Streets, basically the whole of George South and the town centre.

He says the vandalism is a deterrent to the ongoing maintenance of infrastructure, and it appears that the ongoing load shedding inadvertently aids the occurrence of vandalism. “Daily maintenance is being done on streetlights, but the vandalised areas must be visited repeatedly. The damages happen at night, and it is evident that load shedding has a contributing factor as some areas which were left on or repaired the previous day, were reported to be damaged soon thereafter.”

The funds that are currently used to repair or replace vandalised and stolen cable can be better utilised and be steered towards George residents who do not yet have adequate lighting. This, therefore, robs citizens of quality and adequate services.

“Even though there is an existing tender for replacement or maintenance of cabling, the procurement process of the stolen or vandalised items is also negatively affected as there is the lead time for some of the items, and with the increase in vandalism and theft, it does negatively impact our stock levels and we try to continuously keep spares. But if it is not halted, it could result in even longer delays for some critical materials.

To curb vandalism, there is a technology we are introducing soon for theft identification linked to response time, this will help to apprehend the thieves. We are also rolling out the pole replacement projects, which are targeted at the high-impact areas, where the drive is to replace the wooden poles with newly designed steel poles. These new poles are designed to deter vandals and thieves by raising the points of access used by them to vandalise or steal cables. It must be noted that given the thousands of poles, the prioritised high-risk areas are the focus while the roll-out to other areas will follow thereafter. Partaking in both the theft identification system and the newly designed streetlight poles rollout, the municipality is making it more difficult for vandals and thieves to continue their activities.

The Municipality continues to report vandalism incidents to the South African Police Service (SAPS), and dockets are opened for investigation.

We appeal to the citizens of George to assist in curbing these indents by reporting incidents to official communication channels of the George Municipality and the police. Vandalism is a crime and ultimately costs ratepayers, money. Vandalism also results in communities being deprived of services.

The public is requested to please report people tampering, painting, breaking, or stealing municipal property with the SAPS and George Municipality Law Enforcement (044 801 6350 or 044 801 6300 after hours) as soon as you see it happening. If you can take pictures of the culprits in the act without endangering yourself, it will help a lot. Thank you in advance for helping us protect our infrastructure.

George Municipality offers a reward of R2500 for information that leads to the successful conviction of vandalism in a court of law. The informant will provide their details to relevant authorities. The informant will not be required to testify as the municipality will protect the identity of the informant. Please report to 0860 044 044 to be eligible for the reward.

The Municipality was unfortunately compelled to temporarily close the Workers Collection Point (WCP) in August 2022 due to ongoing safety challenges and concern for the well-being of the staff. Following a risk assessment that was conducted and addressed at the facility, the George Municipality is happy to announce that the workers’ collection point services have resumed, and the facility is operational again as of Monday this week.

“The WCP was established for private individuals and businesses to make use of it as a central point for those who wish to employ temporary workers,” said Dr Kosie Haarhof, Deputy Director of Strategic Growth and Development, in the George Municipality.

The WCP is situated at 12 Industrial Street, George Industrial and operates between 07:45 and 15:00, Monday to Friday. It is staffed by the following two officials from the Planning and Development Department

Kevin Abrahams, Email: kabrahams@george.gov.za;

Ongeziwe Mthongwana, Email: omthongwana@george.gov.za

For enquiries, please phone the office on 044 801 9173.

Ends.

A local hip-hop artist (Leigh-Muir Booysen) has created a song as part of the Garden Route District Municipality Illegal Dumping Campaign.

Intro:

Just pause
Just pause

Verse

Stop, stop illegal dumping/
Don’t do it, bro, let me tell you one thing/

It’s sad to see how it affects our country/
Sadly, it all starts in our community/

Killing our land, I see people writing eulogies/
Dumping garbage in the sea,
Knowingly killing our fish/

We are the cause of environmental pain/
So if you are feeling guilty,
Just listen to what I’m saying/

I’m trying to explain,
What you gotta do/
Don’t litter, man,
I’m telling you now,
That ain’t cool/

It’s crucial to our faith
We gotta make a change,
Let’s keep our planet safe/
We can’t just sit and watch
as the planet goes to waste/
There are many ways to do it, let me show you the ways/
We gotta pave the way for our next generation/
Avoid using paper,
Make use of digital payslips/

It’s easy, just throw your waste in a bin/
Recycle, and get money,
It’s a win-win, ah/
One hand washes the other hand/
Let’s work together for a cleaner and a greener land/

Hook:

Just pause/
And throw it in a bin/
It’s easy, just throw it in the bin/

David Viviers, an actor, and author of the book Mirage read a snippet from his book as part of World Read Aloud Day. The book is available as an eBook on Libby, the library app that can be downloaded by all registered Library users.

Please see videos of David Viviers reading his book:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8ilh9KqwUo

The George Municipality’s move to explore alternative energy-generating sources is gaining impetus, as the Executive Mayor of George Alderman Leon van Wyk accompanied by the Municipality’s Electrotechnical Services team participated in a Wheeling and Trading Symposium that was held on Wednesday, 8 February 2023 at the Hawthorn Boutique Hotel in George, in partnership with a private electricity trading company, Enpower Trading.

Energy Wheeling is generally defined as the delivery of electricity generated by a private operator in one location to a buyer or off-taker in another location via a third-party network (Utility or Municipality). Therefore, the George Municipality intends to do wheeling services to explore available energy sources, steering them towards the Municipal grid, while also looking at a cheaper cost of electricity than Eskom’s current cost. With all the privately generated energy coming into the grid, the Municipality hopes to lessen reliance on Eskom as well as become energy secure.

The speakers and panellists during the discussions were Phillip van Niekerk from the hosts, Enpower Trading, Jeandre van Zyl from Solar Energy Africa, Gerjo Hoffman from Open Access Energy, Josh Dippenaar from Sustainable Energy Africa, Nhlanhla Ngidi from SALGA, Bernhard Teuteberg from DEDAT Western Cape and Jemaine Cupido from Bitou Municipality facilitated the proceedings of the symposium.

The Symposium attracted representatives from the energy sector and companies from George and other parts of the Country, Municipalities from the Garden Route District such as Mossel Bay, Bitou, Oudtshoorn, Hessequa and Knysna as well as Municipalities outside the district such as Swellendam Municipality, Nelson Mandela Bay Metro from the City of Gqeberha in the Eastern Cape, and the Executive Mayor Mzimkhulu Thebolla of Msunduzi Municipality from the City of Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal.

Welcoming the attendees, the Executive Mayor of George Alderman Leon van Wyk said in his opening remarks that the unreliability of Eskom’s electricity supply and the increasing intensity of load shedding is causing huge disruption and damage across many production sections and the economy. “From a municipal perspective, our KWH sales have naturally declined even with households having to do their chores at times when electricity is available.”

“While we are encountering power supply disruption, we need to look to innovation to take us forward into new opportunities. Today we will be discussing Wheeling. This new topic is the disruptive radical change that will take us forward into a new era of trading in electricity, creating generating facilities and transporting electricity to where it is needed,” van Wyk added.

“I am very proud of our team here in George which has moved the boundaries in their quest to find solutions. Last year as a team we set new challenges in saying we needed to mitigate the risks that our municipal infrastructure faced, i.e., water treatment works, wastewater treatment works, and pump stations during load shedding. As 2022 progressed we also concluded that the Solar PV route needed to be supplemented by the rapid introduction of Battery Energy Storage.”

The first wheeling transaction took place in May 2022 at George Municipality, following the signing of the use-of-system agreements in July 2021. The billing process has for many years been done manually, requiring extensive time for verification and preparation of bills once the data was retrieved from the meters.

“The need for this freely licensed software pilot became evident when we considered wheeling and renewable energy scaling on the George Municipality’s electricity grid. The manual billing process was one of the main challenges and resolving this meant reducing reliance and pressure on key human resources, reducing potential errors that could occur in the billing process,” said Mr Bongani Mandla, the director of electrotechnical services at George Municipality.

Mr Bongani Mandla highlighted that the current George Municipality wheeling pilot consists of trade between one generator and four off-takers through Enpower Trading (a NERSA licensed Energy Trader) and this entire process has now been automated using Open Access Energy’s software.

“The Municipality is working on further improvements to its wheeling projects and to incentivise the private sector (both generators and off-takers) to participate in this program. These include creating a platform for customers to view their accounts and access their consumption and billing data in real-time on a portal, working with DEDAT Western Cape Government to speed up standardising the use-of-system contracts as well as moving from the 30-minute reconciliation to a Time-of-Use reconciliation by latest end of March 2023,” Mandla concluded.

Gerjo Hoffman (Chief-Executive-Officer and co-founder at Open Access Energy), Phillip van Niekerk (EnPower Trading), Cllr. Mzimkhulu Thebolla (Executive Mayor of Msunduzi Municipality from the City of Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal), Ald Leon van Wyk (Executive Mayor of George), Bongani Mandla (Director for Electrotechnical Services – George Municipality) Jeandre van Zyl (Solar Energy Africa), Josh Dippenaar (Sustainable Energy Africa) and Jemaine Cupido (Bitou Municipality)

Jemaine Cupido (Facilitator from Bitou Municipality), Gerjo Hoffman (Chief-Executive-Officer and co-founder at Open Access Energy), Josh Dippenaar (Sustainable Energy Africa), Phillip van Niekerk (EnPower Trading), and Jeandre van Zyl (Solar Energy Africa)