A war between armed robbers targeting electricity cables in Eldorado Park and an army of community members intent on protecting their power supply has erupted — with the community set to declare victory after 14 arrests within hours.
The community of Eldorado Park has been hit by ongoing power outages and has now taken to sorting out the problem itself after weeks of failures by City Power security and police, who have been unsuccessful in apprehending the culprits.
Local ward councillor Dwain Ponsonby has been leading a community group in actual combat as they “deal with this ongoing heavy problem ourselves because nobody else is going to”.
“We were fed up so we rallied together what support we could — the community, councillors, the CPF, security companies — and we divided into groups at night and headed out to patrol the hot spots,” Ponsonby said.
“We know they strike when we go to sleep, so we went out through the night, only going to sleep at four or five in the morning. Some okes just went straight out again to work. We started talking to people who knew stuff. It was hard and everything was quiet,” Ponsonby said.
“But now the successes are starting. We are not new on the ground anymore and we are starting to know who’s who in the zoo. The information is coming in, even though the guys we’re after threaten to kill people who talk, like they are doing in Kliptown, where they have been killing people almost every day — shooting them execution style in broad daylight and at night,” he said.
Ponsonby said they knew the cable thieves were working in large gangs and had bakkies and rifles. They have information on where the big cables are and when they are scheduled for load-shedding, meaning they know when it’s safe to target the high-voltage copper cables, which they dig up and pull out of the ground with bakkies.
“After the substation burnt down we knew the cables would be sitting ducks, ready to just be taken. So we pulled in every community member we could — we got about 120 people that night. We used a school classroom as our base and we patrolled nonstop since then,” said Ponsonby.
Those thieves thought we would give up with fatigue, but we outlasted them.
“Those thieves thought we would give up with fatigue, but we outlasted them.”
Their first success came on Tuesday night when a patrol group led by Ponsonby encountered a group of men with flashlights in the bushes near Boundary Road at about 10pm.
“We approached them and then they came towards us with guns. So there was a bit of a shoot-out between us and them. We called everyone and managed to catch nine of the 25 guys we counted and spotted,” said Ponsonby, adding that the main gunmen were among the ones who got away.
The suspects were arrested and booked into the Eldorado police station cells. On Wednesday Ponsonby and his crew, along with the police, went out to the local informal settlement where they managed to catch five more suspects who had gone to sleep.
“The community did a stellar job of f**king them up,” Ponsonby told Sunday Times Daily at the police station, where the five men were being questioned after their arrest.
“That guy there in the mustard top is a gunman and he hates me. The guy with the dreadlocks is a mastermind who threatened us with an R4 last week. He got shot in the foot last Thursday and has been walking around with the bullet in him ever since. He knows we were waiting for him at the hospital. These guys are like military machines,” he said.
It’s organised crime and it’s growing beyond anything City Power can handle. We are not law enforcement and we have our own job to do.
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said cable theft was a huge and ongoing challenge. He said thieves regularly targeted the Eldorado Park area for the cables, causing outages at the local military base, pathology laboratory, Power Park, Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital and the nearby mortuary.
“It’s organised crime and it’s growing beyond anything City Power can handle. We are not law enforcement and we have our own job to do,” he said, adding the problem was now attracting the attention of “the guys from Dudula who are fed up and claiming that they know who the cable thieves are”.
He said they were working with Eldorado Park community members and confirmed the latest arrests.
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