When councillor Nomxolisi Phezisa arrived at her office on Wednesday morning she found the place flooded.
The pipes had been stripped away.
Criminals have repeatedly targeted the councillor’s office in Kwalanga township in Nelson Mandela Bay with no intervention from the police or the municipality.
Phezisa said they have reported the break-ins on four occasions, but to date, nothing has been done.
“We’ve even taken the case numbers to the municipality but nothing has been done. No one from the municipality has ever come to assess the damage or even attempted to provide security,” Phezisa said.
From important documents, electrical cables, plumbing, taps, lights and even the kitchen sink, criminals keep stripping the office bit by bit.
The councillor says it has become difficult for her office to provide adequate services to the community because the office does not have electricity.
“The cables were stolen last year,” said the frustrated councillor.
“The municipality is aware of this. We sometimes have to turn people away because we can’t help them as most things run on electricity.” She said she mostly works through WhatsApp.
“The office doesn’t really have any equipment to work with,” she said.
The community of Kwalanga has been plagued by cable theft and infrastructural damage in recent years. The community library was the first to be vandalised.
The mayoral committee member for safety and security, Stag Mitchell, said on Tuesday during a mayoral report-back session that the city intends to ramp up security efforts to safeguard municipal infrastructure.
“We will have a deployment of 150 EPWP workers to safeguard the equipment. They will come from across the metro, with the majority of people guarding the infrastructure in their own wards,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell mentioned quite a number of municipal sites which will benefit from the city’s security efforts but Xaba Hall, where the councillor’s office is located, did not make the list.
NMBM spokesperson Mthubanzi Mniki had not responded to questions from Scrolla.Africa at the time of publication.
Pictured above: The vandalised office in Xaba Hall, Kwalanga township in Kariega.
Image source: Supplied
