Power Cuts At City Waldorf Residences Have Left Students With Rotten Groceries

By Magnificent Mndebele

City Waldorf Student Accommodation was rocked by protests this week as tenants took to the streets after staying two days without water and electricity.

Two of City Waldorf’s inner-city residences have been without water and electricity since Sunday.

Many students had just bought groceries and which they had packed into refrigerators, but on Tuesday night, their frozen meat began melting.

“We don’t have electricity now and the management hasn’t provided electrical back-up. We are facing this situation again and they do not provide again. It has affected us, the month has just started and allowances from homes have been finished on the food that is getting rotten,” one protester said.

In some of the rooms, there is ice-water mixed with blood from the different types of meat causing a foul odour.

City Waldorf’s Public Relations Officer, Khaya Mofokeng, said the spoiled food would be compensated with the aid of Gift of the Givers.

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Bathrooms at City Waldorf’s Bree smell of unflushed human waste. One woman told The Open Journal that she was frustrated because she was on her period and was unable to take a bath because of the power cuts.

The protest became violent and the tenants began vandalising City Waldorf’s property.

About four people were hospitalised, including City Waldorf’s security supervisor who suffered a knee injury after narrowly escaping being set alight.

The protesting tenants hid the keys of City Waldorf’s buses preventing them from fetching students from University campuses.

Mofokeng admits that City Waldorf waited too long before taking any action because they believed City Power would fix the problem sooner than later.

“City Waldorf didn’t think it would take this long because there was a generator that was here as a backup but we only identified that it had a lot of faults when we were connecting it. We hired another generator and we found out that it was too small, it only pushed five floors. Then, we hired a second generator, which is the one we are currently using,” said Mofokeng.

The protests lasted only two days taking place on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. Tenants affected City Waldorf’s residences are not alone as much of the Johannesburg CBD has been without water and electricity for seven days.