JOHANNESBURG - Acting Joburg Mayor, Kenny Kunene, says illegal power connections are costing the city billions.
Kunene led a service delivery campaign in Johannesburg this morning, focusing on by-law enforcement and efforts to improve infrastructure across the city.
According to Kunene City Power is paying Eskom for electricity that cannot be accounted for, as a result the city is losing billions of rands to illegal connections
"It's a big syndicate, City Power has suspended 15 people connected to this, the city is serious about fighting this scourge, it's a pandemic,' he said.
Meanwhile City Power has raised concerns over cable theft sabatage in the inner City, particularly Marshalltown which continues to cripple power restoration.
According to the power utilities CEO, Tshifularo Mashava the city’s underground electricity network is being targeted by highly organised criminal
syndicates .
These attacks according to Mashava are no longer mere thefts but they are deliberate and destructive acts of sabotage aimed at bringing the city to its knees.
Additionally he says it endanger technicians and threaten Johannesburg’s service reliability
READ | Illegal connections | Residents point fingers in the dark
On Monday at least 440 metres of critical medium-voltage copper cable
was stolen from the Anderson West distributor, supplied by the Central Substation.
This happened during ongoing repair work for the major outage affecting Marshalltown which comes just days after a 260 metres of cable was stripped from a service tunnel in Albert Street on Saturday.
Such underground cable thefts according to Mashava in a single weekend paint a devastating picture of the depth and danger of this crisis.
While restoration of power continues across the inner City, Mashava has condemned this act.