South Africa has gone more than a year without a scheduled blackout. For a country that spent the better part of two decades rationing electricity in shifts, where the daily load-shedding schedule became as essential as a weather forecast, Eskom has held. The state utility that became both a national embarrassment and a test of whether South Africa could fix anything at all has, for now, delivered. Investor confidence has edged upward, the rand has steadied, and firms that once budgeted for diesel as a fixed operating cost have quietly stopped doing so. 

Johannesburg, however, is a different story. 

City Power, the utility responsible for distributing electricity across the country’s economic capital, is losing a slow war against its own infrastructure. Substations fail, cables are stolen and sit unreplaced for weeks, and in late April the utility recorded more than 1,200 open fault calls in a single day with around ten substations simultaneously dark. It has begun scheduling its own planned interruptions, the operational concession that years of deferred maintenance now demand, while carrying R5.3bn in arrears to Eskom with another R1.6bn due next month. Eskom has threatened to cut supply to a city that cannot pay its bills let alone upgrade the wires that carry them. 

Johannesburg is where the South African economy is largely conducted, where capital is allocated, contracts signed and goods dispatched across a continent. Banks, insurers, manufacturers and logistics firms are overwhelmingly concentrated within City Power’s distribution area, and every unplanned outage costs them in diesel, ruined stock, lost shifts and idle machinery, costs that accumulate across thousands of businesses every month but never appear in any national statistic, because officially the electricity crisis is all but over. The crisis has simply become a municipal one, scattered across substations and billing departments rather than broadcast across a country, and considerably easier to ignore. 

Load-shedding was impossible to dismiss because it struck everywhere at once, making it as much a political failure as a technical one. City Power’s failures are absorbed one firm at a time, which suits the politicians and officials responsible for the utility well enough. No serious public accounting of what the outages cost Johannesburg has ever been attempted, and without one, the pressure on those responsible remains comfortably low. The costs exist in generator logs, insurance claims and investment decisions quietly made in favour of other cities, but they have never been assembled into the kind of evidence that forces a response. 

Sustained strategic communications can do for City Power what visibility alone did for load-shedding, building the kind of public record and political pressure that turns a dispersed, easy-to-ignore municipal failure into one that demands a response. Johannesburg’s businesses have both the data and the means to make that case, and the longer they do not, the more of Eskom’s hard-won progress gets quietly undone at the substation level. If there is reason for optimism, it lies in what Eskom has already shown that with enough pressure, even the most entrenched failures can be reversed. 

– Mauritz Venter
Account Manager