The R2,000 cost of rotten food: Why load shedding never ended for Johannesburg residents

<h2>A system under strain</h2>

<p>The numbers behind those complaints are significant. In its latest quarterly report, City Power says it continues to face significant energy losses with an infrastructure backlog of R44 billion. Roughly 60% of outages stem from ageing equipment – some of it nearly a century old. A further 20% are caused by theft and vandalism, 15% by external factors such as Eskom faults and third-party damage, and 5% by network overload, particularly in informal settlements.</p>

<p>There are signs of improvement. <a href="https://iol.co.za/business/economy/2026-06-22-can-south-africas-average-salary-still-buy-a-middle-class-life/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The number of outages</a> fell by about a fifth between the April-to-June and July-to-September quarters, and the average time a customer spent without power dropped from just over 24 hours to just over 14. Restoration times also improved, with nearly 97% of unplanned outages fixed within 24 hours.</p>

<p>But City Power still missed its own target of 98%, and for the residents who fall into that remaining 3%, the statistics offer little comfort. Those are the households’ waiting days, not hours, for someone to arrive.</p>

<p>City Power's total infrastructure incidents over the past few years.</p>

<p>Image: City Power</p>

<h2>Theft as a way of life</h2>

<p>Cable theft is among City Power’s most intractable problems, and the scale of it goes beyond opportunistic crime. “The theft of copper cable and vandalism are moving targets across the length and breadth of the network infrastructure,” City Power said in its latest report. “A step change and multidimensional strategy is required to combat cable theft, vandalism and sabotage.”</p>

<p>The utility has stepped up its response. Essential infrastructure crimes declined by 13% compared with the same period a year earlier, and convictions are rising – in the first quarter, 12 suspects were sentenced to a cumulative 97 years and eight months in prison, compared with seven suspects receiving 61 cumulative years in the same period last year.</p>

<p>Static security officers have <a href="https://iol.co.za/business/2026-06-21-heres-how-you-can-save-up-to-r2000-a-month-this-winter/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">been deployed</a> at bulk and major substations across the network.</p>

<p>Yet the outages keep coming. Every successful cable theft triggers a cascade: a section of the network goes down, a repair team is dispatched, materials are sourced, the fix is made – and then the cycle starts again somewhere else. For residents at the end of that chain, the experience is of a city that cannot protect its own infrastructure.</p>

<h2>The bigger picture</h2>

<p>Beneath the operational challenges sits a financial crisis that makes everything harder to fix. The City of Johannesburg and City Power owe Eskom approximately R5.28 billion, and while payments totalling around R1.2 billion <a href="https://iol.co.za/business/2026-06-08-the-surprising-reason-your-electricity-bill-is-soaring-this-winter/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">have been made</a> since Eskom threatened to cut supply, an overdue balance of approximately R2.7 billion remains. The current account due on 5 June went unpaid.</p>

<p>That debt does not directly cause the outages residents experience, but it shapes the environment in which City Power operates, one where a R44 billion infrastructure backlog competes for resources with an escalating Eskom bill, and where the room to invest in the network is shrinking.</p>

<p>“For residents and businesses, the message is simple: Johannesburg’s electricity crisis has been delayed, not resolved,” said the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse. For the resident who has stopped asking what went wrong and now just waits for the lights to come back, that assessment will feel exactly right.</p>

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