The City of Cape Town has launched a ‘Protect Your Power’ campaign to vandalise streetlight infrastructure in Kraaifontein. The energy teams are attending the requests related to streetlight, across the city.
They are prioritising all vandalised infrastructure as a matter of urgency. The officials from City of Cape Town has attended over 3,000 streetlight service requests across the city, between Oct 23, 2024 and Nov 05, 2024.
Considering this, the City of Cape Town has announced its ‘Energy Streetlight Focus’ initiative, earlier in 2024. The idea places a large focus on vandalised infrastructure and on enhancing the repair turnaround times.
Member of the Mayoral Committee for Energy – Alderman Xanthea Limberg joined the electricity teams in Kraaifontein and attended streetlight service requests from Botfontein Road.
Limberg emphasised that Kraaifontein is one of the hotspot areas of the city. It is unfortunate that they are seeing many repeated streetlight vandalism cases along the busy Botfontein Road and in the surrounding area.
“As soon as we repair infrastructure, it is often vandalised again,” said the MMC for Energy.
She added that there were a number of streetlights that were damaged beyond repair and it was truly shocking to see the extent of vandalism and theft in the hotspot areas. The scale of required repairments, often impact the repair turnaround as the entire grid needs to be replaced completely or multiple equipment or pieces of infrastructure must be procured.
According to her, the impact of streetlight vandalism and theft is huge across the city and this compromises public safety and also places a significant financial burden on the municipality.
She highlighted that these acts of destruction divert resources from essential services and hinders the efforts of the City of Cape Town to improve the lives in the different communities living here.
The operational interventions of the city are bearing fruit and they are seeing the success across all regions. “Much more can be done and we are working hard to ensure that vandalism and theft are reduced as far as possible,” said Xanthea Limberg.
Energy MMC added further that support by public and reporting illegal activities to the City and South African Police Service (SAPS) help then in identifying new trends and they urge residents to continue assist them in bringing criminals to book.
Alderman Limberg noted that she and her team attended over 3000 streetlights requests, that counts as more than 14 days between Oct 23, 2024 and Nov 05, 2024. They will be attending many more in the coming weeks.
The City of Cape Town has taken call to action and is urging residents to join them combat streetlight theft and vandalism, by reporting to the city officials, so that they can create safer and brighter communities.