City of Tshwane mayor Cilliers Brink says crime intelligence needs to be roped in to fight cable theft as the municipality loses an estimated R100 million annually to replace cable lost to theft.
Earlier this week, there was cable theft at Nyala Substation causing power outages in large parts of Pretoria East. The City announced on Thursday that power is back after it completed restoring the substation.
Brink said the metro can’t fight the battle alone and crime intelligence must be roped in to deal with “sophisticated” crime.
“There is a combination of private security companies and their own security. There are about 1500 security in-sourced by the city. Now it is good to say it is your security, it is your installation, secure it.
“But this is in fact not a private security issue. The South African Police has got a role to play as well. It is a very sophisticated network that trades in cables and so fourth. We try to work with police but we often find that police stations don’t have cars and don’t have personnel.
“So that places enormous pressure on us and money that could have been spent on developments and laying out infrastructure, is now spent on securing facilities. To give you an idea, I was informed that in the past two weeks there was an armed attack at Nyala Station where 15 armed robbers came in.
“Now to have 15 people attack a facility each with a gun, you can put up as much security as you want, that is a sophisticated criminal operation requiring crime intelligence and investigation to track down what is happening there. So it is an extremely difficult situation that we are under,” he added.
Brink said the municipality might need to cough up more money to enhance technology at its sub station to curb cable theft.
“The solution going forward is probably going to be a far greater use of technology. We have a budget in the city manager’s office for the use of technology but it certainly is not enough. We are going to need to combine technology with some kind of armed response that is the only way,” said Brink.
