Business life in Komani is grinding to a halt as a power outage enters its eighth day.
A large portion of the Enoch Mgijima municipality-run city last had electricity last Tuesday. An exploding municipal transformer and damaged cable triggered the crisis.
On Monday the town’s CBD was dominated by the sound of clattering generators and sight of shops closed for business.
Corporate stores were taking no chances and many drew their shutters, including Edgars Active, Clicks, Truworths, Ackermans and Identity.
Enoch Mgijima municipal spokesperson Fundile Feketshane appeared to shift the responsibility to Eskom, saying the municipality had requested a transformer from Eskom to replace the damaged one but the transformer offered by Eskom was leaking and needed to be repaired in East London.
“This will be worked on on Tuesday by Eskom and once the leaks are repaired, an accredited service provider will transport it to Komani,” he said.
Feketshane said the estimated time of travel was two days to prevent the transformer from being damaged in transit.
“The projections are that the community affected should be back on the municipal grid by Wednesday,” he said.
Adré Bartis, the voice of business in the town representing the Komani branch of the Border-Kei Chamber of Business, said 139 members of the chamber were reporting huge losses in trade.
While corporate stores had the option of closing, it was the smaller, independent local businesses that felt the pain.
These were firms that could not afford to haemorrhage R10,000 a day on diesel for generators.
Bartis said it was frustrating that there was only vague communication from the municipality.
She lambasted the municipality for not having a crisis management response or plan.
She was unable to dig out further information on how members were doing as there was no power in the chambers’ offices. Their computers were dead.
Bartis said offers from the chamber and its members to help the municipality were brushed aside. She said they were told they were interfering.
Other businesses spoken to on Monday accused the Enoch Mgijima local municipality of failing to create an environment conducive for businesses to operate.
Residential areas were also affected by the outage.
The suburbs of Westbourne, Madeira and Kings Park were all in darkness.
Some of the most unhappy customers were arms of government itself.
Home affairs provincial spokesperson Gcinile Mabhulu said: “This is affecting our performance target because if we are not working we have to account as to why we are not working. Even our backup generator at the offices is not working and we have been trying to get a service provider to look into it.”
Mabhulu said their Komani home affairs office serviced a huge area, with people coming in from as far as Lady Frere and even Cala, an hour and a half away, for birth and death certificates and smartcard IDs...