There have been 248 cases of cable theft reported to City Power in less than two months, with the southern Johannesburg identified as a hotspot.
“As the City of Joburg we are grappling with a serious problem of vandalism and cable theft across the City. Most of the southern suburbs and townships are the hotspots of cable theft, including Eldorado Park,” City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena told Sowetan on Wednesday as they were disconnecting illegal wiring in Klipspruit, Soweto.
“This is partly due to the vast land area around those areas where our cable is running through stretches of open spaces and bushes, and also the mushrooming informal settlements whereby our cables are stolen and used to illegally connect electricity to the informal settlements in the area. We have retrieved most of these during the cut-off operations.”
He said they have received about 248 incidents of cable theft between March 1 and April 19. Eldorado Park has been plunged into darkness since last Thursday when a local substation caught fire.
This resulted in a spate of cable theft in the area. The damage of the fire is believed to be about R20m.
“We saw a number of cable thefts and vandalism of infrastructure since the fire started, affecting Eldorado Park, Power Park, Klipsruit, Nancefield and Lenasia. Among the incidents include one where our mini-substation was vandalised and set alight with Yellow Pages telephone books, just behind the substation that burnt. It gives you an idea why we believe that some of the accidents we encountered could be man-made.
“We also had cable thefts in Nancefield substation where five cables were stolen just hours after the fire, and another theft of cables in Ennerdale, Lawley and Vlakfontein ... affecting Zakariyya Park. Outside Nirvana substation also, there was an incident last week,” said Mangena.
He said his unit lost two security guards who were ambushed and shot dead near Carr Street in Newtown in Johannesburg. “This goes to show how brazen and dangerous the cable thieves are getting, and assert our earlier believe that this is an organised crime committed by not just an ordinary person, [like] a nyaope addict who wants a quick fix.
“The situation is getting very dangerous with heavily armed gangs involved in the theft, and it’s not the first time our security [personnel] have been attacked and shot at by cable thieves.”
The utility has lost R187.2m due to cable theft in the past five years and R19.4m in the last financial year alone.
Eskom has also been affected. Spokesperson Tumi Mashishi said employees get intimidated, held hostage and in extreme cases assaulted by some of the communities in Soweto and the rest of Gauteng.
Mashishi said an Eskom-contracted security officer succumbed to head injuries in January after he and six of his colleagues were shot at by about 30 heavily armed suspects during an alleged attempt to steal copper cable outside the Eskom Klipspruit Customer Network Centre (CNC) in Soweto.
In another incident, three guards sustained injuries during an attack in Eskom’s Winterveld substation in February, Mashishi said.
"“We have in the recent years recorded an exponentially high number of failed mini-substations due to the network overloading as a result of illegal connections, meter bypasses and tampering, unauthorised operations on the electricity network, vandalism and theft of electrical equipment across our areas of supply in Gauteng,” Mashishi said.
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