By Promise Dube
Bulawayo’s Pumula Old Suburb residents are thrilled to have their electricity back after enduring three months without power.
Ward 19 Councillor, Lazarus Mphandwe, told CITE in an interview that electricity had finally been restored.
He added that Section C was affected, and only two homes were still to be restored due to weak voltage.
“We’re happy to have electricity again,” Mphandwe said. “Some residents blamed me, but I too began to wonder if it was political because the repair took so long.”
The councillor continued by saying that local businesses impacted by the energy shortage were preparing to reopen.
He claimed this was an unprecedented event, their first time experiencing such an extended outage.
“Load shedding usually causes power cuts, but this time, a burst transformer left us without power for three months,” the councillor explained.
According to residents, long-term power outages negatively affect both businesses and residents.
Residents stated they had to travel to Pumula North to buy meat and milk because their local butcher had closed due to the faulty transformer.
“The butcher where we bought our meat closed because of the burst transformer. We had to go to Pumula North to buy meat and milk,” residents said.
Resident Nhlanhla Nkomo said the lack of electricity presented a significant challenge as they had to rely on those with power to charge their phones.
“We could ask people with electricity to charge our phones, but we couldn’t ask them to keep appliances like refrigerators running,” Nkomo said.
