February 3, 2003

BARBARA MOKGOTHU and her children sit on the pavement outside their house in Dobsonville, Soweto watching cars career down the busy Roodepoort Road.

For the past five years, their street has been cloaked in darkness. Broken street lights have meant that they could barely discern the shapes of cars, or people, travelling through their suburb. But now that their street lights have been fixed, their houses are illuminated, and the surrounding streets are filled with a burning yellow glow.

"Before we couldn't sit out here like this," says Mokgothu. "It used to be so dark in this road. We didn't feel safe. There were so many burglaries and we couldn't see the skelms (thieves). We just kept on hearing that people had been burgled. But since we got the lights, we feel much safer - it is so bright now."

Bringing light - two workers from City Power

An added advantage of the new street lights, adds a neighbour, is that residents can now save on electricity costs. "It's cheaper for us because we can switch off our lights inside the house and sit outside instead. It's so hot inside and it is better out here. There is enough light now."

More and more suburbs in Soweto, south of Johannesburg, are lighting up. At night the township looks like a blanket of glittering diamonds, blue and orange lights flickering.

"What is exciting," says Enock Zikalala, the public lighting manager at electricity utility City Power, "is how these street lights have changed peoples lives." This is especially true in Soweto, he says, where the community was literally kept in the dark under apartheid.

"Soweto never had street lights before. The infrastructure in this township is predominantly new and it's really ironic that they have gotten a better quality of lights (high-pressure sodium street lights) because they never had any street lights," Zikalala says, laughing wryly.

These sodium lights, which cast bright yellow light, line most of the township streets. According to Zikalala, sodium lights prove cheaper in the long run, last longer and are invisible to insects. In contrast, Johannesburg's older suburbs such as Roodepoort and Randburg, still use mercury vapour street lights, which do not last as long as their newer peers.

Zikalala says City Power plans to make lighting through out the city more uniform by using sodium street lights. "Our long-term approach is refurbishing lighting for the whole of Johannesburg. These lights are the latest in light technology. It's a little bit more expensive but most municipalities are going for this kind of lighting.

"One of these lights can last for three years, or for 1 600 hours. The mercury lights can burn for two years and insects often fly into them."

He acknowledges that there are still many communities in Johannesburg who do not have basic lighting infrastructure, especially in informal settlements. But, he says that City Power formed its public lighting division in 2002 with the mandate to install light across Johannesburg.

And streetlights are rich pickings for copper cable thieves. On a 27km stretch of the newly completed Soweto Highway in the south, street light infrastructure was vandalised three times. R2 million later, faced with stripped cables, City Power decided to encase the lights in concrete to deter thieves.

"Now it looks beautiful," Zikalala says. "But it is sad. Had the infrastructure not been vandalised, we could have used the money to expand the network to other communities."

And if you have ever wondered why parts of Sandton are dark, it is because residents have been protesting against the building of streetlights for many years. Why, you ask? "They have wanted to keep their areas looking like farming suburbs," says Zikalala.

But now some of these communities in the northern suburbs have seen the light, so to speak. Gert Hoffman, City Power's planning engineer for public lighting, says his department is "flooded" with calls from Sunninghill and Bryanston residents, pleading for the installation of streetlights in their suburbs.

"There is an area of Sunninghill where residents are raising money for us to go and install their streetlights. They said they need it so badly they will pay for it themselves. Now they are realising that they want to walk around at night. People don't realise how important streetlights are. You know we don't cater for individuals. We go street by street and this can take a very long time," he says.