Since December, the headquarters of the Eastern Cape State Education Department in Nelson Mandela Bay University in South Africa have been without electricity.
Since early December, staff at Nelson Mandela Bay’s Department of Education headquarters have been working in the dark, without electricity.
However, the provincial government claims it has reached an arrangement with the municipality to restore power to its offices.
The provincial department owes the municipality around R11 million in outstanding bills. When we arrived at the office on Monday, we observed dozens of parents and students, some of whom requested to rewrite their matric tests, being turned away.
Officials from the offices in Sidwell, Gqeberha, and Cannon Street in Kariega told GroundUp that the power was turned off on December 10. Visitors to the offices were filling out paperwork outside in the yards and sitting in dark passageways.
A security guard on the premises stated that a municipal official visited in December and instructed the guards to notify education authorities inside that he was about to turn off the energy from the kiosk box. “Since then, officials have stopped working at 1 p.m. every day. They were aware that the department owed the municipality. “It’s not the first time they’ve turned off the power due to debt,” the guard explained.
A senior official, who did not want to be identified, stated: “I came here to receive my [ten years or more service] award, but it could not be printed because the computers were turned off. We are unable to claim our prizes because they have been stuck on those machines since last year.
Mamela Ndamase, Nelson Mandela Bay municipal spokesman, stated that the department’s services were disconnected due to unpaid invoices. The department was notified at least 14 days before the disconnection occurred.
Ndamase stated that the department owed the municipality R46.9 million, but had just paid R17.9 million. “A further R17.4 million is pledged during the following seven days. The outstanding balance will then be R11.6 million, which the department has pledged to settle by the end of April,” she said.
“The obligation to pay for rates and services is the same as it is for other debtors,” she went on to say.
Malibongwe Mtima, the Eastern Cape education spokeswoman, confessed that they owe the municipality. “We have now made payment arrangements with the municipality, and everything is now back to normal at district offices.”
He stated that the lights were turned on over the weekend, but declined to comment more when we reminded him that they were still turned off when we arrived at the Sidwell office.