City Power CEO Tshifularo Mashava says the power utility is in a bad financial situation as it is faced with aging infrastructure and continues to bear the brunt of theft and vandalism.
In the entity’s annual integrated report for the 2021-2022 financial year, Machava paints a bleak picture, saying, “over the past few years, the power utility had a negative revenue, surplus and cash flow concerns about its financial position...The risk of the energy crisis in SA has become untenable and the residents and businesses in the City of Johannesburg have borne the brunt of this undesirable situation.”
She said 127,000 prepaid domestic customer meters had been bridged, are faulty, not commissioned, bypassed and inaccessible — contributing to high non-technical losses as well as a further 14,000 for postpaid customers.
Mashava said the entity’s cash collection rate is between 75% and 88%, which is far below its budgeted revenue collection levels of 95%.
She said the state-owned entity had an overdraft of more than R6bn and was heavily dependent on the City of Johannesburg to meet its cash obligations.
Mashava said some of the entity’s achievements included the provision of service delivery and combating theft and vandalism.
They had also managed to install 1,034 public lights against a target of 1,000 and 81.70km of electricity cables against a target of 27km.
“A total of 5,769 dwellings were provided with connections to electricity against a target of 3,200,” said Mashava.
She added that a total of 52 people were arrested for theft and vandalism.
Mashava said two suspects were convicted to imprisonment of eight and five years respectively for essential infrastructure crimes (cable theft and vandalism).
Mashava said theft, vandalism and illegal connections continued unabated, significantly contributing to the loss of supply to customers.
“The organisation saw an increase in the number of essential infrastructure crimes. This is especially worrisome for City Power as this negatively affects the provision of services,” said Mashava.
She said power utility continued to experience destruction of infrastructure, frequent equipment failure, network overloading, high frequency and duration of outages, vandalism and bridging of meters and network hijacking.
Moreover, Mashava said the entity had a network visibility issue where it struggled to urgently respond to queries from customers.
“There is a limited visibility of the electrical network resulting in extended outages and restoration times. Currently, City Power has a Scada [supervisory, control and data acquisition] reach of only 34%, which compromises the integration and results in poor response times. Over the years, minimal budget allocation was given for investment in visibility of the network,” said Mashava.
She said there had been delays in the municipal public accounts committee (MPAC) of the City of Joburg sitting to approve its debt write-off due to the 2021 local government elections and the creation of committees.
“MPAC meeting of June 15 2022 recommended the write-off of R1,3bn to council. As at June 30 2022, no approval had been received from council.”
kokam@sowetan.co.za
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