-Shortage of available contractors to attend outages in Johannesburg.
-City Power has not been able to settle outstanding amounts owed to contractors that have rendered services.
-The DA is demanding immediate action to address this backlog.
The ANC-led coalition continues to thwart small businesses, which are key drivers of job creation, through its inability to manage the City’s finances and ensure contractors are paid.
This has led to a shortage of available contractors to attend to outages.
The DA demands full transparency on the entities’ finances and calls for immediate action to address the backlogs. This includes ensuring contractors are paid what they are owed and requiring the City to address inefficiencies and wastage so that funds are available to serve residents.
City Power, a municipal-owned entity of the City of Johannesburg, is struggling to settle outstanding amounts owed to its contractors for services rendered, largely as a result of the chaotic coalition’s failure to ensure monies are paid over to the entity, which has made it fully reliant on in-house staff, who are not able to meet the high demand of individual household and business outages.
Businesses across the City are having to make difficult decisions about whether to stay open, how to pay wages, or whether to move out entirely.
It’s not just businesses suffering; individual households can expect to wait 10 days or more before being attended to. If your house loses power, you can wait almost a week and a half in the queue before anyone attends to it, and the job reference number will likely be closed, requiring a new ticket number.
In accordance with our Manifesto 2026, if elected, we will keep the lights on by reinvesting electricity revenue into infrastructure and freeing municipalities to buy and sell their own power.
When the City fails to pay contractors, it threatens jobs in those businesses, while prolonged outages put jobs across Johannesburg at risk.
The Johannesburg Executive Mayor, Dada Morero, together with his coalition partners should take all councillors into confidence on the current situation and respond accordingly.
Johannesburg residents deserve effective service delivery and an accountable municipality that can keep the lights on.