Durban - KwaDukuza Municipality says allegations of threats and intimidation and staff’s failure to co-operate with management within the electricity business unit are to be investigated.
The municipality held a meeting on Sunday to discuss ongoing long electricity outages that have been a source of public complaints.
The meeting included Mayor Lindi Nhaca, deputy mayor Thulani Ntuli, speaker of council Dolly Govender, the municipal manager Nhlanhla Mdakane and his executive directors.
In a statement the municipality said the leadership expressed concerns and unhappiness over the turnaround times when attending to outages, coupled with the lack of coherent communication about the current issues affecting timely restoration of electricity after outages.
The following challenges affecting the administration of electricity operations was noted by the municipality:
- Ongoing load shedding implemented by Eskom since September.
- On November 3, KwaDukuza experienced a heavy storm coupled with lightning which further caused disruptions to the network. A high volume of reports was received during this period which created a backlog .
- The committee noted that certain officials had been refusing to take lawful instructions to work after hours, including weekends as part of an alleged go-slow
- Allegations were raised that certain officials had been threatening their colleagues to prevent them from taking lawful instructions from management. This includes failures to co-operate when instructed to attend to call-outs during outages. Municipal leadership and management have interpreted this stance as an on-going fight-back campaign against the council’s decision to manage exorbitant overtime paid over the years.
- The response turnaround time by some contractors has been poor and not in line with the signed Service Level Agreements.
- The manual fault-finding approach has an impact on the turnaround time for restoring electricity. It was noted that the long-term solution (Scada system) to address this issue is currently being installed for implementation in 2023.
- The customer care centre has been receiving a high number of complaints which the current municipal infrastructure fails to handle due to several reasons.
- There have been challenges in relation to real-time communication of outages.
With regard to the alleged act of misconduct and intimidation of staff members, the municipality said the leadership expressed dismay over the number of employees within the electricity business unit who had reported threats of intimidation.
“(Leadership) also noted allegations that there are some staff members who have illegally entered several municipal sub-stations and interfered with the network in order to cause this crisis,” said the statement.
In the meeting the leadership mandated the municipal manager to investigate these allegations.
“Should the investigation find such allegations to be true, disciplinary processes will be implemented without fear or favour,” said the municipality.
The municipality acknowledged the right of the public to protest and demand accountability.
“We wish to categorically send an apology to all customers who were affected by this crisis. We want to assure the public that we will effect relevant consequence management and hold people accountable, in particular those who deliberately acted against the interests of this council. We urge our customers to be patient as we continue to ensure that the service is fully restored.”