Joburg’s power woes: DA says ANC fails to maintain electrical infrastructure

Nico de Jager, DA’s Gauteng spokesperson for cooperative governance and traditional Affairs (Cogta) has blamed the city’s administration for Johannesburg’s electricity woes.

This follows Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse’s (Outa) Wayne Duvenage making damning allegations about City Power’s refusal to accept help from Outa, which could have assisted in their fight against vandalism and theft to their infrastructure.

Duvenage said: “We’ve reached out to City Power to help them with vandalism of their substations. They don’t even want that assistance, they’re not engaging enough with their citizens, with their community.”

Cameras and armed response

He said City Power did not respond to the proposal made to them last year.

Duvenage said part of the proposal included “an application that we will get residents to download in the areas. We’ll get cameras around the residents and around the substations.

“We will get armed response that is linked to the residents in the area to get to the venue quickly in case there is theft taking place, [we] will be the eyes and ears”.

City Power’s Isaac Mangena however said in response: “City Power values collaboration and any input or contribution towards addressing theft and vandalism are welcome.

“We are open to constructive dialogue and partnership opportunities to combat this scourge. We will look into the supposed proposal and engage Outa.”

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The DA said the issue stemmed from a revenue value chain that was compromised from the City of Joburg project called Pakhama from 2010, a billing system meant to sort out problems with residents’ water and lights.

De Jager said: “It was the ANC government that failed to maintain existing infrastructure. The ANC introduced the prepaid system without thinking it through.

“If they had introduced a service fee from the start, then residents would have known what they have to pay and this idea of introducing a service charge years later to make up a shortfall could have been prevented.”

This speaks to the recent addition of a R200 surcharge for prepaid users by City Power electricity users effective from 1 July, which Outa wants scrapped.

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“They’re looking to try and get as much revenue as they can, looking for all these extra revenue items, but they’re not doing it properly and so this knee-jerk reaction to introduce the tariffs with all the mistakes … some people are getting billed twice in a month,” said de Jager.

He added that increasing these costs would cause residents to shy away from buying property because the expenses would be too high.

Duvenage added: “We’re calling for the city to rather look at how they can start saving money. Where can they reduce their contracts, can they do what we call a zero-based budgeting approach, which reassesses all their expenses, and take a different approach instead of just increasing costs to citizens.”

The DA added that electricity infrastructure was failing because of years of lack of investment into the maintenance and refurbishment of infrastructure like cable replacement and upgrades of transformers and mini substations. Instead, over the years, municipalities started spending on unmandated services.

City Power asks for more engagement

In response, Mangena said: “City Power has been upfront regarding infrastructure challenges culminating from a range of issues including, but not limited to ageing infrastructure, illegal connections, theft and vandalism.”

He added that there was an exponential growth of demand for electricity while City Power was sitting with an infrastructure backlog of more than R46 billion.”

De Jager said in the legislature the DA would continue to call municipal entities to account.

“We will use our muscle to call the politicians and officials to appear before committees such as Cogta to account. We will use our mandate and powers from the constitution to do so.”

Mangena, meanwhile called on political parties to help them deal with the underlying issues “by engaging and encouraging their constituencies to pay for services so that we can address the infrastructure challenges.”