Safer neighbourhoods: City attends to vandalised Gugulethu and Nyanga streetlight infrastructure

08 September 2024

The City’s Energy teams are attending to streetlight related requests across the metro. This week, as part of the City’s streetlight repair programme, the Mayoral Committee Member for Energy, Alderman Xanthea Limberg, joined the local electricity teams as they repaired vandalised streetlights and infrastructure in Gugulethu and Nyanga.

‘Our teams are committed to ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our communities. The City’s streetlight repair programme is making significant progress. Between 31 July and 27 August 2024, we attended to more than 12 650 streetlight-related requests across our city.

‘The Gugulethu and Nyanga areas are particularly hard hit by criminals who vandalise streetlight infrastructure on a regular basis. To combat this, we are implementing a number of measures to protect our community infrastructure.

‘By investing in our streetlight infrastructure and by taking a comprehensive approach to fight vandalism, the City is demonstrating its commitment to providing a safe and secure environment for all. City teams are responsible more than 245 000 streetlights and interventions put in place to tackle streetlight-related notifications, including historic streetlight service requests, are yielding significant results despite the crisis-levels of repeated theft and vandalism.

‘Between April and June this year some R7,3 million was spent by the City to fix theft and vandalised infrastructure. We’ve put more boots on the ground with contracting services and also through our Energy Safety Teams, beefing up resources with about R40 million to tackle this crisis. We ask residents to stand with us to Protect Their Power – and keep the lights on. Report suspicious activity anonymously,’ said Alderman Limberg.