Update
KNYSNA NEWS - Knysna residents who use the local post office will jump for joy to hear that the blight of vagrants sleeping on the premises at night, is now over.
It took a story of KPH journalist Nwabisa Pondoyi to successfully highlight this problem that the post office had been battling with for more than a decade.
Apart from making a mess where they slept, the presence of these vagrants also deterred people from fetching their post after hours.
However, Martie Gilchrist from the post office's communications division says the problems with people sleeping on the premises is now a thing of the past.
"We’ve installed new locks and have been able to lock the facility as from 21 November and since then we have not had a problem with vagrants."
The box area is accessible from 07:30 until 17:00 during the week and 13:00 on Saturdays, says Gilchrist.
When Pondoyi first wrote the story, she heard how the post office cleaning assistant Dean Bruiners had to clean up after the vagrants early each morning and that sometimes this even included human excrement.
At first, Knysna-Plett Herald was told that a lack of funds prevented the post office from fixing the problem.
The Knysna post office is now vagrant free.
In a follow-up article on 2 November showing that the problems persisted despite increasing complaints from people, including posting unhappy comments on social media, the issue was at last dealt with.
After seeing a post on Facebook, Mossel Bay-based Ingrid Collin contacted the paper, saying, “One of my friends said when they went to fetch their post they saw vagrants there smoking dagga and he didn’t feel safe.”
This, she said, reminded her of an incident that took place three years back on these premises.
“My grandmother was robbed and punched at the post office… What else needs to happen for this to stop? Where are we supposed to feel safe?”
Shortly after Collin's comment, and yet another story by this publication, the problem was solved.
Read a previous article: Post Office vagrants ongoing saga
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