Khayelitsha Streetlights Campaign

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According to a short history compiled by the DG Murray Trust, the issue of streetlights in Khayelitsha was first highlighted by an article by Nokubonga Yawa in June 2012. Nokubonga had been an Equal Education activist and staff member for many years, but was by then working at GroundUp. Her article highlighted the fact that the lack of streetlights has been a problem for years.

In September 2012, Yawa wrote a follow-up piece which showed that nothing had been done, despite promises and excuses by various City of Cape Town officials. On the same day GroundUp published an editorial on the issue, which included a map of the streelight outages in Khayelitsha.

By the end of 2012, the DA and Helen Zille had not taken any action to fix the Khayelitsha streetlights. On 15 January 2013 only 11 streetlights were working on Landsdowne Road in Khayelitsha. The next day GroundUp published a piece by EE Treasurer Doron Isaacs, calling out Zille and Patricia de Lille for their fake promises, Twitter spin and tendency to blame the poor instead of attending to service delivery.

By 30 January, GroundUp reported the City was making some progress in fixing the lights. However, officials continued to make excuses that we didn’t fully believe. They claimed the lights were fixed in September 2012, getting the “burning rate” up to 90%, but this did not accord with the reality we observed. Secondly “vandalism” and “cable theft” were blamed as the main problems. These are obviously real problems, but to some extent they were used as excuses to cover for a lack of maintenance over the years. In fact, at around the same time, it was reported that copper wire theft had been cut massively.

 

Meanwhile, comrades from EE, SJC and TAC had already been discussing a night march down Landsdowne Road to demand streetlights. The date for the night march was set for Monday 4 February 2013. On 1 February, the City rejected the notice about the intended march, sending an email stating:

“The police have said that they are unable to commit police to tonight’s march, as there have been other protests happening in Khayelitsha today, which they are concerned about.”

This may have been the true reason, but quite possibly it was political, designed to give the City another week to fix the lights before our march. The date of the march was then moved to Monday 11 February. By 11 February, the City had indeed fixed a number of the lights. We decided to continue with the march as a celebration.

GroundUp did monitoring and follow-up pieces throughout 2013. Their first report was in April. In August they reported that 88% of lights on Landsdowne were working, but other problems were noted. In December 2013 GroundUp reported a roughly similar situation.