A Greenwood Park family was furious after they were left out in the cold for almost seven days without electricity because, according to the landlord, they had failed to pay their electricity bill for the month of May.
However, the mother of three, Janine Clark, who has 9-year-old twins and a three-year-old toddler, is adamant that she paid the landlord in full. Clark said in May, they did not need much electricity so they requested an electricity token of R500 for the month. Despite protestations from the owner, electricity was eventually restored on Saturday, 5 June. “Despite telling him that we will not need more than a R500 voucher, he persisted and gave us a R1 500 token. My husband then told the landlord that we only requested just R500 because we still had previous vouchers that we did not use. The landlord’s response was: “use what you need and we will sort it out at the end of the month”. Come month-end, my husband only paid for the R500 that we had used,” she said.
“We told him that we did not owe him anything. We paid our rent together with the R500 electricity bill and water.” Clark said her three-year-old is still fed the bottle milk and doesn’t understand why “mommy” could not make him a bottle. “The situation was frustrating and unbearable in these cold weather conditions. I couldn’t take my children to school because they couldn’t bath with cold water. I had piles of unwashed laundry because I couldn’t use the washing machine, it was honestly depressing,” an infuriated Clark said. Section 28 of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution states that “every child has the right to basic nutrition, shelter, health care and social services, as well as the right to be protected from maltreatment, neglect, abuse or degradation”. Which Clark, in this case, felt she was failing her children because she was deprived of her right to access to light even though she paid for it.
Responding to the accusations, the landlord Arnray Woodenberg, said he will not give them the token unless they pay him what they owe which is R1000 for the month of April. “The tenants know that they have to pay rent which excludes the utilities bill. They pay R1 500 for electricity every month and that was the agreement. However, this family decided not to pay for their full amount of lights claiming that they still have tokens from the previous months. I will not give them any tokens without any form of agreement as to how are they going to repay the money,” he added. Woodenberg did agree that there was no new lease agreement when he took over the property, which meant the tenants were using the old lease that the Clark family signed in 2013. Clark says they have filed the matter with the KZN Rental Housing Tribunal and met their lawyers yesterday, 8 June. The Durban North News reached out to the previous property owner, Oliver East, to get more answers about the lease agreement, but could not get a comment at the time of print.
