Kneeling in front of an electricity box grappling with a mass of wires, Walter Khumalo is on the front line of an intensifying battle between South African suppliers and those trying to steal power.
As an electrician for the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC), he reconnects cut power connections in the Soweto township on the outskirts of Johannesburg.
Khumalo knows he’s breaking the law and the risks that come with it, and this week, while working on severed lines, he was caught.
Four men grabbed him and threw him into the boot of an unmarked car before tearing off down the road, trailed by a vehicle bearing the sign of the country’s state power utility Eskom.
“There’s no life without electricity,” said Mantsepi Sello, whose power was cut in the two-bedroom home where she lives with 11 other people near where Khumalo was picked up. “In the morning we can’t drink tea, we can’t cook, we can’t eat, we can’t do anything. And it’s even worse for the small children to attend school and to study at night without electricity.”
South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitution, hailed as one of the most progressive in the world after decades of white minority rule, guarantees rights to free basic services like housing and healthcare.
It is this promise that the SECC believes it is fulfilling by restoring power in South Africa’s Soweto township where Eskom says just 20 percent of households pay for power.
But it is clear that the beleaguered state utility is losing patience.
“Not having a job and struggling does not give you permission to go and do a criminal activity. It’s like saying just because I don’t have a job I can take your wallet and run away with it. We can’t do that,” said Eskom’s Bandile Jack.
In the wake of a 45 percent tariff increase request for each of the next three years to build power stations and expand a grid that caused country-wide blackouts last year, Eskom is stepping up its fight against electricity thieves.
The theft, alongside widespread cable theft, is a deadly gamble that frequently claims lives and is draining the power giant’s coffers of unpaid revenues.
It’s a cost that the state-owned supplier can ill-afford, amid a latest crisis that this week pitted the company’s chief against the board chairman in a dramatic power-struggle.
A South African investigative television program recently quoted a leaked Eskom report showing a 35 percent revenue loss in May in the residential sector, mostly due to energy theft and meters that reflect free supply.
Aside from this, outstanding Soweto electricity bills accounted for nearly 2 billion rand (US$272 million) of nearly 3 billion owed, the program said.
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