Load shedding: Loss of cell phone signals leads to more crime in rural areas

Minster Bheki Cele recently confirmed in his reaction to parliamentary questions that his department has not conducted a study of the impact of load shedding on crime. Free State Agriculture (FSA) had already conducted a survey in February amongst its members from which this report emanates.

Summary: Higher levels of load shedding leads to more crime and losses in farming communities. The growing lack of mobile reception and signals (due to load shedding) complicates communication for farmers. It also makes emergency services inadequate.

Introduction
Free State Agriculture (FSA) is increasingly receiving complaints from farming communities regarding the non-availability of mobile phone signal / network coverage in their areas. Farmers complain that they have no recourse, that they can’t even contact the customer service centres of mobile service providers to do their error reporting. It is also reported that with load shedding and limited/non-vailability of mobile phone networks, there is an increase in crime which negatively affects farmers on their farms, thus posing a major security risk to them. The survey by the Free State Agricultural Rural Safety Committee was therefore requested by several farming communities in the Free State.

Load shedding and crime
FSA’s Rural Safety Committee conducted a recent survey in 38 Free State farming communities Regarding the impact of load shedding on their operations.
57.5% of respondents indicated that they experience 40 and more hours of load shedding per week. This represents between 1 and 1½ working days / production days per week that are wasted. That’s a 14% to 20% loss in productivity every week. The survey also shows that farmers suffer from more crime during load shedding. It is:
• 40.55% of crimes are related to product theft (diesel, seeds, fertilizers count)
• 24.9% infrastructure theft including copper cable, solar panels and galvanized sheet theft
• 18.43% livestock theft
• 15.7% theft of implements and vehicles.

64.4% of farmers indicated that they had experienced between 1 and 4 crime incidents in the past 3 months when load shedding took place, while 21% indicated that they had between 5 -19 crime Incidents. This means that possibly between 323 and 768 crime incidents occurred during a 90 day period on 2% of farms in the Free State.

Mobile power and mobile networks
There are on average 5 family members living on farms. 92.5% of the persons use Vodacomor MTN’s service. In 89.4% of cases farmers, their families and workers had limited to no communication during load shedding. 93.12% of respondents indicated that their mobile phones experience problems with either Vodacom or MTN outside load shedding schedules. Especially the farming communities of Bultfontein, Clocolan, Dewetsdorp, Heilbron, Hoopstad, Jacobsdal, Kestell, Koppies,
Marquard, Odendaalsrus, Petersburg, Rosendal, Tweeling, Verkeerdevlei, Welkom’s farming communities have indicated that the entire farming community is increasingly negatively affected by poor mobile phone signals/networks . Respondents attributed this to the impact of load shedding on the mobile phone networks.
The survey by Free State Agriculture also showed that 58% of farm workers, their families and farmers could not get hold of emergency services in the last 3 months due to poor mobile phone networksignals due to load shedding.

Finding
Farmers experience more incidents of crime during load shedding. Load power also has a negative Impact on agriculture’s communication networks, especially at critical times when the SAPS and or Emergency services must be called. This increases the risk of farm attacks for farmers, their families and farm workers.

Action steps required

1. Mobile phone service providers must come up with urgent interventions, or bring in
rebates for farming communities, subsidies for setting up Wi-Fi towers and green energy
in order to ensure communication in rural areas, as well as establish an alternative
reporting centre (WhatsApp) number for error reporting, which in turn can better address
the impact and scale of crimes.

2. Greater necessity for organized communities and farm guards communicating by radio
(and other) networks.

3. The State must come forward to establish alternative communication networks via radio,
satellite & other connections.