Panic buying and violent protests after power failure in Port Elizabeth
Residents thought municipality to blame
Protests in Motherwell, Port Elizabeth, turned violent on Saturday after residents were left without electricity from Friday. Electricity was restored on Sunday. A vehicle was torched and all major roads into the township blocked with burning tyres and debris. Five cars were badly damaged.
Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality spokesperson Mthubanzi Mniki said, “Over the weekend it was a cable fault that led to the blackout. Fixing it took time.”
On Monday, residents were again without electricity for two hours after a circuit breaker at Motherwell South substation tripped, according to Mniki.
Police spokesperson Andre Beegte said a case of public violence had been opened but there had been no arrests.
During the protests, a young boy, holding stones in both his hands, said, “This place will soon be ungovernable … We will only open this road when electricity is restored. No car will pass this area or we will burn both the driver and their car.”
Thoko Amanzi, a mother of two who works as a mechanic in Uitenhage, said, “The residents are justified to protest, but I don’t condone the destroying of property. It is very expensive to buy a car only to see it being burned to ashes by an angry mob that has issues with their municipality. I don’t support this violent behaviour. We should only protest peacefully.”
She said, “We were caught unaware by this blackout. I had stashed my deep fridge with food stuff to last the entire month. I have had to throw away the food to dogs because it was smelling badly … Where will I get money to replace that food? I only get paid at the end of the month and there are two weeks remaining.”
She said she was hoping to join other residents to seek compensation from the municipality.
Residents scrambled to buy candles and paraffin at spaza shops. Bread and milk also soon vanished from shelves.
Mohammed Musa, who owns a spaza shop in NU8, said, “We quickly ran out of stock. Residents were buying in panic. Bread, candles, matches as well as paraffin quickly sold out. We also sold a lot of drinks and tinned food as some residents did not have time to cook on their own. The situation reminded me of a war zone where people buy in bulk to stockpile food.”
Musa said they could not restock their shelves because “we were afraid that our vehicles would be stoned. So we ended up turning away hungry customers. By Sunday morning, I had run out of food stuffs.”
Letters
Dear Editor
For the last 20 years no municipality has had to explain itself, no municipality has had to contend with riots like we see and hear them today. Communities are fed up with municipalities, angry at the lack of response from the municipalities. In fact, municipalities are required to communicate with their communities.
Let me explain, in this incidence with an hour of the breakdown of the electricity supply, there should have been posters and boards declaring the cause of the disruption, plus an estimate by when the problem will be fixed and an apology to the community as well. Municipalities don't communicate to the residents who then conclude the worst and act accordingly.
Municipalities, just like Sanral, don't communicate.
© 2017 GroundUp. 
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.