COVID19 unemployment leads to Electricity overload

Ikemeleng Kroondal
Steven Ramokhula
21 / 07 / 2020

Ikemeleng is located in Rustenburg in the North West Province.

Over the years Ikemeleng has been a dark city without electricity. Activists have been fighting and writing reports about the matter.

In the year 2016 ,Ikemeleng started having electricity for the first time since 1994. People celebrated the coming of light. Ever since the coming electricity, Ikemeleng started coming to Ikemeleng as tenants.

With more people looking for accommodation, landlords started building rooms for tenants and the transformers were made to accommodate a certain number of houses.

Since the beginning of covid 19 Pandemic, more people started bridging electricity since they do not have sources of income. With that in hand, transformers cannot cope to supply the number of houses.

For the past two months, every evening main switch in the transformer keep switching off. Yesterday July the 20th, municipal workers came to fix the circuit breakers as those in the main line were not coping with the load.

The same day yesterday evening, a transformer burned. The entire section went dark because the transformer is overloaded.