Shocking litany of problems lie behind power outages plaguing Johannesburg
Decrepit infrastructure, illegal connections, vacancies in crucial engineering posts and underspending of the capital budget are just some of the reasons for scores of power cuts across Johannesburg every week.
According to City Power’s Twitter account, on Thursday there were up to 16 outages, mostly due to infrastructure failures.
Power cuts and illegal connections cost more than R400m in revenue annually, said City of Johannesburg spokesperson Nthatisi Modingoane.
Meanwhile, City Power’s fourth-quarter report revealed a total of 162 vacancies in departments ranging from enterprise support and metering to engineering, finance and business sustainability.
The report said City Power also faced a backlog in electrification projects that is exacerbated by urbanisation and migration.
“This increase is putting a strain on the city’s infrastructure, including the electrical network that is already old and decaying as a result of historical disinvestment.”
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said more than 90% of the power interruptions the city experienced are caused by factors such as cable theft, network overload, illegal connections, third-party damage and vandalism of the electricity network.
He said City Power has partnered with the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department (JMPD) and the city’s Group Forensic Investigative Service (GFIS) to monitor the network and arrest and prosecute cable thieves.
Mangena said a plan had also been developed in partnership with the GFIS and JMPD to deal with illegal connections, and several hotspot areas had been identified.
Azar Jammine, chief economist at Econometrics, said small businesses were particularly hard hit by the outages because they could not afford generators.
“The city needs to invest in appointing skilled engineers and supply chain managers,” Jammine said, adding that the situation would not change if City Power continued not spending all its capital budget.
Economist Kim Silberman said money allocated to state-owned enterprise (SOE) bailouts would be more effectively spent on fixing local government infrastructure.
“If SA does not deal with service delivery at local government level the country will not be able to grow at levels that will reduce structural unemployment ... And if you look at the budget, we are cutting allocations to provincial and municipal infrastructure to fund SOE bailouts,” said Silberman.
Mulbarton hairdresser Kylie Gehm-Van der Merwe said the area had experienced power cuts every Friday night and Saturday morning for the past two months.
“We had to move clients around to ensure we don’t lose them. Saturdays are our busiest days, but we continue to experience power cuts — no-one seems to care,” she said.
Paula Ferreira, who lives near Glen Vista, said regular power cuts were compromising her security.
“I’m forced to operate my gate manually and the electric fence batteries are always not fully charged,” she said, adding that some of her appliances had been damaged as a result of outages.
Last week, an unplanned outage at the Orlando substation left several areas in the south of Johannesburg without electricity for nearly seven hours.
This led to Rand Water’s Eikenhof pump station being unable to operate and several areas in Johannesburg, Mogale City, Merafong City, Westonaria and Rustenburg were left without water.
Rand Water spokesperson Justice Mohale said the problems at Eikenhof were due to power outages that had since been fixed. “The areas now all have water.”