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Richard Muponde, Plumtree Correspondent
PLUMTREE town entered its seventh day yesterday with no electricity due to theft of copper cables affecting business and the delivery of essential services.
Mangwe legislator who is also the former deputy minister of Home Affairs, Cde Obedingwa Madlala Mguni said the power outage has brought everything to a halt in Plumtree.
Plumtree has been without electricity for the whole week due to theft of copper cables along the Bulawayo- Plumtree line.
In an interview, Cde Mguni said to make matters worse some Zesa lines and transformers, especially in Mangwe have not been working for almost a year now.
“The power outage has badly affected not only business and irrigation systems but also hospitals, clinics and schools. How does the health sector keep medicines which require low temperature when there’s no electricity in every two to the three days per week?” asked Cde Mguni.
“Even when power comes some of their lines or transformers haven’t been working for a year. I have been helping the community with my personal transformers from my mines. Some lines were erected but not functioning. It’s catastrophic.”
Plumtree Zesa area manager, Mr Victor Ndawana yesterday said the power outage was caused by theft of copper cables.
“There has been a copper cables theft again along our line from Bulawayo to Plumtree,” said Mr Ndawana.
Two weeks ago, Plumtree town and its surrounding areas was plunged into darkness for close to a week after thieves stole a 1, 2 kilometre long copper cable at Cyrene High School in Figtree.
Power was then restored only to go again after the latest copper cables theft.
Zesa has been losing cables worth millions of dollars to thieves with some targeting transformer oil for sale on the black market.@richard muponde
Online Reporter