MyJHB

Stuff from Johannesburg

PKTT Effects Arrests

The Gauteng Political Killings Task Team (PKTT) has arrested five employees of the Emfuleni Local Municipality in connection with allegations of fraud, theft and tampering with essential infrastructure.

The arrests follow a takedown operation conducted on Friday, 21 August 2026, in Vanderbijlpark.

The arrested suspects are employees of the Emfuleni Local Municipality, attached to the Revenue and Electrical Departments.

Preliminary investigations have established that the suspects allegedly operated a scheme in which they misrepresented themselves to municipal clients as duly authorised officials who could reconnect electricity supplies that had been disconnected by the municipality.

Clients were allegedly instructed to pay various amounts of money directly into the suspects’ bank accounts in exchange for the illegal reconnection of electricity.

The suspects are further alleged to have unlawfully reconnected electricity supplies without the authorisation of the municipality, resulting in the illegal use of electricity and financial losses to the municipality.

The Gauteng PKTT will continue to work with relevant stakeholders to ensure that those who abuse their positions for personal financial gain are held accountable.

The five arrested suspects are expected to make their first appearance in court on Monday, 24 August 2026.

The investigation remains ongoing, and further arrests are anticipated.

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Top Star Drive-In: The Cinema on the Mountain of Gold

The Ferreira Dump began growing in the late 1800s, composed of the crushed rock and chemical residue left over after early, inefficient mining processes had extracted as much gold as the technology of the time allowed. By the 1960s, it was a flat-topped, man-made mesa overlooking the city. In a stroke of entrepreneurial genius, the surface was tarred and the Top Star Drive-In was opened. It quickly became a South African institution. Its appeal was not just the movies, but the unparalleled view: as the sun set, the massive white screen would flicker to life against a backdrop of the glowing skyscrapers of the Central Business District, separated from the viewer only by the elevated M2 highway.

In the decades before television arrived in South Africa (1976), the Top Star was a primary social hub. It was a democratic space in an undemocratic time; while the city below was strictly segregated, the “car” served as a private bubble that allowed a degree of social freedom not found in traditional theaters. For many Johannesburgers, the Top Star was a site of nostalgic rites of passage—first dates, family outings where children were piled into the back of station wagons with blankets and flasks of tea, and the Saturday “car market” where the parking lot transformed into a sprawling hub for buying and selling second-hand vehicles.