By Nangamso Mabindla
26 August 2004

BUFFALO CITY'S Electricity Department Revenue Protection Unit has a mammoth task ahead as it tries devise ways to eliminate persistent illegal connections and theft of electricity.

Responding to a complaint last week from Duncan Village residents who complained that people in neighbouring shacks were making illegal connections, the City's director of engineering services, Shaun Peard, said the City had gone to great lengths to seek solutions to this problem.

"Regular raids are conducted in informal settlements to remove the illegal connections that are overloading our network. This overloading in turn causes the legally connected consumers to lose their supplies," said Peard.

Duncan Village and CC Lloyd Township, west of East London, are the most widely affected areas. In Pefferville, also west of East London, people were tampering with meters, while others were bypassing legal connections and hooking illegal connections up to the mains.

"In Pefferville almost all the meter boxes located in the streets have been vandalised and the meters destroyed," Peard said.

Carrying out ongoing repairs to the meters was no longer a viable option, because "no sooner have the repairs been carried out then they are vandalised again". Repairing damaged meters was costing the municipality in lost revenue, as each meter cost R1 000 to repair, Peard said.

Perpetrators were also difficult to track down as some communities protected them from officials.

While unregistered erven were not supplied with electricity, this did not entitle people staying in the area to illegally connect to a power source, Peard said.

The municipality called on the local communities to help combat the problem.

For those who could not afford electricity, Peard added, the municipality had an indigent policy, in terms of which qualifying residents could receive six kilolitres of free water, 50 kilowatts of free electricity and a monthly grant of R118 towards other services.