Brits, the town of vanishing steel

BRITS – By day, our minds are too busy with life’s problems and dodging sewage spills and potholes on our roads to see all the damages criminals are causing to the infrastructure and beauty of our little town. By night, when the dust settles, one can see the cracks that starts to show. Non-working to non-existent street poles, darkness in almost every street in town, not to mention the Solar powered LED lights that cost a fortune to install by the Madibeng Local Municipality barely working properly. Prostitutes or “woman of the night” as they are called on every dark corner in Brits CBD with drug dealers not that far behind. But, a new breed of criminals are scurrying like rats out of the garbage dumps, with some community members calling them magicians. Why magicians you ask? Because they can make anything with copper inside or steel frames disappear by the next morning without a trace. An example of this is on Hendrik Verwoerd Avenue on the R511 where the safety barriers are being stripped away nightly and sold off to scrap dealers. Our towns infrastructure is being taken apart by criminals with largely the dark nights that engulfs the town’s many streets to fall victim to business, water meter and copper/steel thefts carried out under the cover of night. There is largely a call for the Madibeng Municipality to send out workers from our community to do work rather than to hire contractors from different provinces to repair the infrastructure and have working streetlights to uncover the darkness at night, to ramp up vigilance in our communities. More suggestions from the community is to station SAPS at scrapyards to oversee the dealings as who brings what to sell and any suspicious persons be immediately arrested. There is also suggestions to hold the scrap yards accountable, who will buy the stolen copper and steel from the criminals, encouraging them to break down the infrastructure even more.