JOHANNESBURBS, GAUTENG — The ongoing Johannesburg inner city power crisis has pushed property owners, businesses, and residents to the brink, exposing severe vulnerabilities in the city’s aging electrical grid. Following weeks of crippling outages, property managers who recently toured the heavily damaged Central Substation are now shifting their focus from blaming City Power to confronting the massive scale of infrastructure theft, sabotage, and systemic underfunding.
The Human and Financial Toll of the Outages
The prolonged electricity failures have caused widespread disruption across the Johannesburg central business district. Retailers, including local Spars, have been forced to discard spoiled stock, while residents are physically carrying water up multiple flights of stairs due to a lack of pressure.
The financial and social strain on property owners has been immense. Angela Rivers of the Johannesburg Property Owners and Managers Association (JPOMA) revealed that out of a portfolio of over 60,000 residential units, more than 10,000 units across 44 buildings were left without power. To keep essential services running, property owners have spent approximately 8 million rand on diesel for generators over a two-month period spanning September and October.
The frustration inevitably boiled over into civil unrest. Rivers noted that despite educational efforts, the lack of power led to threats of rental boycotts and violence. Building managers had to be temporarily removed from certain properties for their own safety against frustrated tenants.
Inside the Central Substation: A Scene of Sabotage
Historically some of City Power’s loudest critics, property owners recently accepted an invitation from the City Power head engineer to tour the Central Substation and witness the repairs firsthand.
Descendending two basements into the underground tunnels, the delegation was met with a terrifying reality. The subterranean spaces, which are roughly 6 to 6.8 feet in circumference and stretch throughout the city via storm water drains, were in pitch blackness. The walls were coated in thick, black soot from previous explosions and fires, absorbing all light.
Rivers detailed the extreme dangers faced by technicians, recounting an incident where six armed criminals infiltrated the tunnels at midnight and held City Power workers at gunpoint. To combat this, City Power has heavily fortified the site, deploying armed guards equipped with AK-47s at every corner and constructing large security cages around critical infrastructure.
Furthermore, all stolen copper cables have been systematically replaced with aluminum. This strategic downgrade makes the cabling far less desirable to thieves, effectively securing the primary entry points into the tunnels.
Current Power Status and Infrastructure Realities
Following the intensive underground repairs, power has been successfully restored to 90% of the inner city. The remaining 10% of outages are due to faults on specific feeder lines, such as the line supplying the Carlton Centre, where cables continue to be stolen or damaged because the city cannot physically guard every single power line.
The crisis has also highlighted a massive mismatch between the city’s original design and its current demographic. The main feeder board at the Central Substation, originally built in the 1980s for a daytime office-block population, caught fire four times and exploded once.
To address this, City Power has relocated much of the infrastructure from the basement to more visible, manageable areas. The newly installed feeder is at least three times larger than the original, designed to accommodate the inner city’s current population of over 200,000 residents—a density the original water, sewer, and electrical grids were never engineered to support.
“Economic Terrorism” and Financial Mismanagement
The physical damage is only half the battle; financial mismanagement is exacerbating the crisis. City Power’s budget was slashed by 26% last year, and maintenance budgets have faced similar cuts. Rivers pointed out a critical systemic flaw: funds collected from residents for water demand levies and fixed charges are not always paid over by the city’s revenue department to entities like City Power and Joburg Water, leaving them in constant deficit.
This lack of maintenance has dire consequences. For instance, substation oil requires monthly changes to prevent fires; the repeated infernos at the Central Substation point to a severe historical lapse in basic maintenance. Furthermore, the inner city’s low water pressure relies on building pumps to push water to roofs for gravity distribution. Consequently, when the power fails, the water stops flowing.
Charles Tlouane, CEO of City Power, recently highlighted the severity of the situation in an article for the *Mail & Guardian*, describing the theft of municipal infrastructure as “economic terrorism.” Both Tlouane and Rivers agree that state intervention is urgently required, arguing that limited municipal funds should not be entirely diverted to secure infrastructure from organized syndicates.
Demands for the Incoming Mayor
With a new mayor expected to take office after November 4, Rivers outlined a clear three-point agenda to stabilize the Johannesburg inner city power crisis and restore basic services:
- Fix the Basics: Prioritize the repair of potholes, pavements, and public spaces to ensure residents can walk safely from their secure apartment blocks to transit hubs like taxi ranks.
- Restore Infrastructure Budgets: Implement and protect proper funding for infrastructure and maintenance, redirecting money currently lost to “fruitless expenditure” back into vital city services.
- Improve Mass Communication: Establish transparent, regular communication channels with the public. Rivers emphasized that keeping residents informed about ongoing issues would significantly reduce frustration, preventing riots, tire-burning, and hostility toward property managers.
As the city looks toward the future, the message from property owners is clear: while the recent underground upgrades are impressive and advanced, long-term sustainability requires consistent maintenance, adequate funding, and a united front against the economic terrorism crippling the city’s grid.
