The Democratic Alliance (DA) in Lephalale has taken decisive community-led action to address widespread streetlight failures following the municipality’s failed flagship streetlight programme.
In September 2025, the municipality launched the Tshuma Mabone Thursdays Programme with much fanfare, presenting it as a structured, weekly intervention to identify and repair non-functioning streetlights across Lephalale, including rural areas.
This initiative has since collapsed into yet another empty promise, quietly fading away without results, accountability, or any public progress reports.
This failure is compounded by the municipality’s continued refusal to account for a grant received to replace more than 500 conventional streetlight heads with LED units, and a contractor-driven LED replacement project implemented at the end of 2024 and beginning of 2025.
In several streets, lights that were previously reported as “fixed” under municipal programmes are once again not working, pointing to poor workmanship, inadequate oversight, the complete absence of a sustainable maintenance plan.
After repeated, unanswered requests for feedback the DA in Lephalale, together with DA Aspirant Candidate Leo Lambert launched a resident-driven identification initiative where community members are marking faulty streetlights with blue ribbons, allowing for visible, verifiable mapping of the crisis.
More than 300 non-functioning streetlights have already been identified.
The DA will formally submit the consolidated data to the municipality and demand:
- Clear timelines for repairs,
- Accountability for failed projects,
- Disclosure of how grant funding was utilised, and
- Consequences for programmes that are launched for publicity but abandoned without delivery.
Streetlights are a basic public safety necessity, not a public relations exercise. The DA will continue to expose failed municipal projects, insist on transparency, and work alongside communities to restore safety and dignity where the municipality has failed.