The identity of the people who splashed bright red paint over Durban’s crumbling elephant sculptures is still unknown.
|||The identity of the people who splashed bright red paint over Durban’s crumbling elephant sculptures remains a mystery as the eThekwini municipality says that municipal CCTV cameras in the area are not working.
The smearing was noticed on Sunday evening on one of artist Andries Botha’s sculptures in Warwick Avenue.
The Mercury requested access to the CCTV footage earlier this week.
But the requests proved fruitless as Charles Khumalo of the eThekwini municipality’s Safety and Security Cluster said on Thursday that the cameras in that area appeared not to have been working at the time because of “power failure”.
“This has been going on for some time and for that reason we cannot provide any footage,” Khumalo said.
However, another city official who is involved with CCTV footage said he had checked the footage of Saturday and Sunday – when pictures of one of the elephant sculptures splattered with red paint were posted on Facebook.
“One of the camera views was obscured by a tree and the other camera was not working at the time,” he said.
When mayor James Nxumalo was contacted for comment on Thursday, he said he was not even aware that one of the sculptures had been splashed with red paint.
Asked about the cameras not working, he said: “I did not know about that either. I will engage city manager Sibusiso Sithole so this can be inspected.”
Nxumalo said the city had tried various methods – including CCTV cameras to prevent the vandalism on the sculptures but, had failed.