City Power does not manage much

Angry resident from Roodepoort writes:

What do you expect, when top management loudly state that they only work office hours? At that level of remuneration, executives are supposed to manage, not be secretaries.

It is all very well for City Power to talk about having to back feed to supply power, but some area, like ours in Georginia, are on a spur and cannot be back fed. They have been promising to fix this for a couple of decades. It was supposed to be in the present IDP as part of the upgrade that hasn’t happened.

More than twenty years ago City Power had technology that would show the status of the entire grid, and immediately pinpoint any problems. Technology has advanced, it should have progressed, but the truth is they got rid of the people who ran the system, and now it is probably broken and useless, but it did exist, and was extremely sophisticated. I know this for a fact, because I know people who worked with it.

Now, the city relies on citizens to alert them about outages, and much of the time the call centre staff are sleeping or partying, or doing something other than their job. I cannot believe that the city is consistently experiencing high call volumes in the City Power call centre at times like two in the morning, yet one still holds on for at least twenty minutes.

Even the installation of the notorious smart meters are a major headache. A neighbour arrived at his office to find that one had been installed. Five weeks later, after countless appeals in many quarters, he has yet to receive his interface unit. Many find the figures on the CIU and the meter never tally, but what else is new?

One of the real reasons for this problem is that the city has approved massive high density development in many places without thought to the infrastructure, which was ailing and in need of upgrade to start with, and cannot cope with the demand of thousands of new homes within small areas. Some of these developments are in low lying areas, and should never have been built in the first place, as they are prone to flooding, proving once again that money talks. This may sound harsh, but it is true, there are guidelines for what is sensible and economically prudent. Town planners are supposed to consider the long term of the residents as well as the individuals.

The bottom line is that our city management does not manage much. For this previously some City Power employees even received a 14th cheque, plus performance bonuses. My question is what for?