Mitchells Plain residents plagued by crime, are thrilled that the City of Cape Town is finally repairing much-needed streetlights in the area, just in time for the onset of winter.

Locals says unlit areas have become breeding grounds for crime, and they are fed-up having to fend off criminal elements by themselves.

The City of Cape Town (CoCT) announced that it would be attending to over 500 outstanding streetlight repairs, primarily caused by vandalism, in the Mitchells Plain area.

According to the Cape Metro, it has been dealing with a high volume of streetlight repair service requests and the situation has been worsened by constant load shedding and weather-related issues.

“This places a lot of pressure on the capacity of teams,” Mayco member for Energy Beverley van Reenen said.

Residents told News24 it was “about damn time” that the City woke up and started taking action to ensure their safety.

Local residents, Nicole and Byron Arendse said while they are happy that the street lights will “finally be working” again they are “annoyed” that the city took so long to realise that the problem had to be fixed.

“There is a lot of crime that happens daily in the area. Every time we must log tickets with the city to get people to come sort these street lights out but then no one comes,” said Nicole.

She added that they had even stopped calling because there are only so many times a person can complain. “When you see your valid complaint falling on deaf ears you just stop taking the initiative to call again,” she added.

Byron added that the increase in daily robberies was of great concern.

Every day there is a message on WhatsApp saying that someone was robbed or that buildings were vandalised or that pipes were again stolen. It’s not nice living in a area where street lights don’t work, its dangerous.

University student Megan Jacobs said it was “scary” to walk to the nearby bus stop in darkness.

“Every morning my brothers and my dad need to walk with me to the bus stop while I wait for the bus because having no street lights is an opportunity for these criminals to carry out their criminal acts. So I’m very happy the street lights will come back soon,” Jacobs added.

The City of Cape Town said more than 350 electricity infrastructure vandalism incidents have been recorded across the metro during the first quarter of the year.

In March alone, 101 incidents were recorded, with Area North being the worst affected.

Van Reenen said Mitchells Plain is the worst-affected district, with 30 recorded incidents. Beacon Valley, Lentegeur, Rocklands and Tafelsig are all hotspot areas.

“More than 500 service requests are currently being attended to, and our electricity maintenance teams are working steadily through all repair and outage service requests.”

“The City is prioritising all extended outage-related area faults caused by load shedding. This phenomenon is expected to get worse as the winter months take full hold and Eskom’s load-shedding continues, likely at high stages.”

Van Reenen added:We cannot allow this to continue any longer and we once again urge residents to join us in our fight against vandalism in our communities. The City is already carrying out an education and awareness drives and a number of initiatives to curb vandalism of critical electricity infrastructure. Our work is yielding positive results in the majority of areas in the metro, but more needs to be done to fight this scourge.

Cape Flats safety forum chairperson Abie Isaacs said it is about time the City intervened and fixed the street lights.

“We welcome this initiative by the City. We firmly believe this has been a tender point for sometime and we are wondering why they are only deciding to fix the streetlights now, when this has been a problem for some time,” Isaacs added

According to him, the lack of streetlights in the area has been contributing to the increase in crime activities in Mitchells Plain.

“No street lights and load shedding is what is increasing the crime on the Cape Flats. Yes, we welcome the streetlights finally getting the much-needed repair they need but we do also hope that there’ll be a maintenance programme to ensure that the street lights stay on,” Isaacs added.

Mitchells Plain Community policing forum (CPF) chairperson Norman Jantjies said that although he’s happy about the repair work materialising, he asks ‘why now?’.

Jantjies said:The lights should not have been broken in the first place. They would’ve been working right through the year. This shouldn’t be a publicity stunt for the city, we are ratepayers and its our right to live in an area where there are proper lights.

According to the CPF, fixing the lights might not stop the crime taking place, but “will contribute towards a safer environment”.

The City has been allocated R40 million to help fight the vandalism of energy infrastructure. This allocation is to support law enforcement deployment, enhance security at key points and increase monitoring.

This does not include the millions of rand required to fix vandalised infrastructure.

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