An electrician from the Tshwane metropolitan municipality, designated to attend to electricity faults, outages and related matters, was accosted by criminals in Olievenhoutbosch who robbed him of his belongings at gun point whilst on duty.
The City’s electrician was responding to a complaint of an outage which was logged thorough the Call Centre. He was accosted and robbed by 2 men wielding firearms at Indlulamithi Street in Ext 23. A wallet containing money, driver’s license and bank cards were taken from him. Case number: 243/4/2019 was opened at Olievenhoutbosch police station.
“In as much as we are grateful for a life spared, we condemn the heartless actions on the City’s employee, which threatened his life. This is a public servant who sacrificed his precious time in order to see to it that residents, in the area where he was confronted, are reconnected to the grid”, said Member of the Mayoral Committee (MMC) for Utility Services, Councillor (Cllr) Abel Tau.
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Member of the Mayoral Committee (MMC) for Utility Services, Councillor (Cllr) Abel Tau.
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On the 4th April this year, a hostage incident occurred at Centurion Golf Estate, in Region 4, where electricity department personnel were forced to do an illegal reconnection while held hostage by the customer together with his associate.
“Such incidents have dire consequences because they hinder service delivery to residents. The City is banking on the communities that are in need of services to protect the electricians and/ or artisans who are on call for infrastructure maintenance”, indicated Cllr Abel Tau.
“The City appeals to members of the community to cease intimidating, assaulting, threatening our officials and damaging our assets such as vehicles and infrastructure components. If some sections of the community persist with this thuggish behaviour, they’ll make it difficult for our officials to respond to service delivery interruptions”, concluded Tau.