Municipality has failed the ratepayers

Chris Steward from Georginia writes:

For many years, Georginia south of the railway line has been particularly affected by outages. Indeed, criminal activity has played a part in this, and that is largely beyond City Power’s control. However, I contend that there are several issues that should fall squarely at the feet of City Power and the Town Planners. For example…

1. Much of the infrastructure is ageing, not having been properly maintained or upgraded over the last 20+ years

2. Town planning has allowed many new properties to be connected to the existing grid, and allowed many former single-dwelling properties to be repurposed for dense housing. The rise in the number of townhouse complexes is staggering. Add in some light industry which has been zoned and enabled in the area, and it is clear that the current utilization far exceeds the capacity of the installed plant. This goes for power, water, sewage and roads. Add in illegal connections from squatter camps…

3. Thirty years ago I was involved in a project for the then Johannesburg Electricity Department, to design, build, supply and install a Supervisory, Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system. With this, the city was able to see exactly what was going on in its network and act preemptively on any abnormal behavior. Today, the technology to do this is vastly more sophisticated and capably. Yet, City Power remain perennially unaware of fault conditions in their own network, apparently relying on the public to inform them. They seem unable to determine how much power is actually being drawn at any point (something that should be obvious to specialists tasked with monitoring the system). It is unsurprising therefore that they are bewildered by the overheating of a (presumably ageing) transformer.

4. Many aspects which are the direct responsibility of the municipality have been “outsourced”. Whilst this model can work in theory, the reality is that they have introduced inefficient, incapable, unresponsive systems onto which they can deflect blame – whilst shirking their responsibility to the ratepayers to whom they are ultimately accountable.

5. Several means have been introduced whereby the community can report faults. This sounds good, and it should be. But it is unacceptable to have to hold on to a telephone call (at one’s own expense) for periods well over 30 minutes before being answered, only to reach a respondent who has no clue of the geography or the technicalities of the industry in which they serve – and who are thus unable to understand what area is affected or what the basic nature of the problem is. Worse, often the call is simply dropped. We have even heard noises of a big party in the background when the phone was lifted, dropped and then apparently left off hook! And not all calls are registered – one has to insist on a ticket number. The SMS facility can take 12 or more hours to respond with a reference, if ever. Tickets are regularly bundled on an assumption that they have a common cause, and then unilaterally closed once one fault has been cleared – in which case one has to start at the back of the queue again to open yet another new ticket when in fact one’s problem has NOT been addressed.

6. We are told that the area is due for an infrastructure upgrade, but see nothing in the budget.

7. Whilst illegal connections seem to be condoned, it is a common occurrence for conscientious ratepayers to be summarily disconnected due to failures within the city’s own billing department – with no warnings, apologies or care for the impact on people’s lives.

8. We have had instances where criminals have stolen critical parts of the infrastructure, causing widespread power failure. Then, when power has been restored, we have been subjected to severe overvoltages which have fried our electronics, lights and appliances. In trying to claim damages for this, we are told that “the root cause was criminal activity” outside the City’s control and therefore no reparations are due. Yes, the outage was caused by criminal activity. But no – the overvoltage was caused by technical staff not ensuring everything was properly in order before reconnecting (typically a Neutral bar has been removed from a substation, meaning that the single-phase supply goes as high as 380V if the protection circuit is simply reset without checking the status). And that is City Power’s fault.

All of this points to ingrained ineptitude, gross negligence and a loss of the institutional memory necessary to ensure continued competent service. Whilst I can only speak with authority regarding the experiences in my area, they are doubtless replicated all over the city as we are dealing with the same entity. The municipality has dismally failed the ratepayers, whom it continues to treat as second-class citizens. It is time they employed competent people (regardless of race), focused on their job instead of politics and spent our money wisely on things that actually matter (as opposed to squandering it on renaming roads or having parties).