Police escorts for Tshwane technicians battling outages

The outages come amid a second day of service delivery disruptions as the result of a strike by some workers.

City spokesperson Selby Bokaba on Thursday announced that the city has resorted to requesting police officers to escort the technicians to the four regions affected by the power outage.

“Tshwane has experienced a series of outages affecting at least four regions due to the strike.

“The city administration has now enlisted the services of law enforcement who are escorting teams to attend to service interruptions in a bid to clear the backlog occasioned by the protest action which started on Tuesday.”

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Bokaba says operations begun last night, but they are low on personnel due to the strike.

“From 11pm last night various teams started going out to attend to service interruptions and will ramp up the operations today despite the depleted capacity of personnel who are being forcibly removed from offices and prevented from performing their duties for which they are remunerated.”

Bokaba adds although power has been restored to most of the areas in Region 3, the technicians continue to face some difficulties.

“The City of Tshwane is currently attending to all reported electricity outages throughout the municipality. Personnel continue to face some disruptions and intimidation from illegally striking workers.

“In areas of high risk we are making sure that our teams are escorted to protect our staff from the illegal strike action. This means that it may take slightly longer to reach outages and to restore electricity.”