The DA in the North West is calling for Eskom to be held liable for an alleged economic loss of R2 million suffered by small businesses, following four days of extended power outages in Mahikeng.
Businesses in the city’s CBD and industrial site, including the Market Square, were recently left in the dark because of the blackouts.
DA’s councilor in the Mahikeng Local Municipality, Arista Annandale has warned that Mafikeng’s electricity crisis poses a threat to the sustainability of small businesses, which are already crippled by load shedding.
“Market Square employs more than 100 individuals and should the center close, it will be a disaster for more than 100 families. Businesses trading in fresh produce had to make urgent alternative arrangements to prevent spoilage and waste.
“One business had to hire a refrigerated truck at R1 500 per hour. The financial loss due to spoiled produce for the four-day period is estimated at R550 000. The trade losses for clothing and furniture stores are estimated at R600 000.
“Guesthouses, restaurants, and other small businesses had to burn diesel to run generators at an average cost of R5000 a day.
“Small businesses are already running electricity backup generators during scheduled load shedding at an additional cost, but once electricity blackouts last longer than two hours continuously per day, as they frequently do in Mahikeng’s CBD and Industrial Sites, it becomes nearly impossible for this business to stay open,” Annandale said.
She said Eskom also needed to improve communication with customers and act swiftly when responding to power outages.
“The DA calls on Eskom to improve its response time to restore electricity supply, particularly in the business sector, and to compensate affected businesses for any financial losses incurred due to its poor response time.
“We again call on Eskom to conduct a skills audit of all technicians and managers and to improve communication with customers in the event of an extended blackout, specifically the causes and the estimated restoration time.
“Business owners struggled to obtain feedback and progress reports from Eskom during this time. It was a struggle to contact key Eskom personnel for an explanation for the outage or to confirm the estimated restoration time,” she said.
North West Eskom’s customer relations manager, Ezekiel Baruti, blamed underground cables for the late power restoration.
“Eskom was aware of the fault, we had multiple cable faults. Some of the cables affected were underground cables, which were under a concrete slab that had to be broken for us to access the cable. We also had to negotiate with structure owners to remove or reach a mutual agreement with them to break them to access the underground cable,” Baruti said.