A 100-day plan to keep Joburg’s lights on

City Power’s collapse threatens Johannesburg’s future. The Centre for Development and Enterprise outlines a 100-day turnaround plan for incoming leadership to restore governance, fix finances and keep the lights on.

Ann Bernstein is the founder and executive director of the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE), a South African development think-tank. She has written extensively on economic growth, unemployment, skills, the state of the nation, and the role of business and markets in development.

Whoever wins control of Johannesburg on 4 November will inherit an electricity utility in deep trouble. City Power’s infrastructure is deteriorating, its finances are precarious, much of the electricity it buys never becomes revenue, and it has been without permanent leadership for long periods.

Today City Power operates with an acting CEO, and 122 of its 278 professionally qualified posts are vacant. The utility has failed to generate enough revenue to cover its costs for several years, while rising Eskom prices, electricity theft, illegal connections and customers moving to alternatives such as rooftop solar are putting further pressure on its finances. By 2025, it was running a deficit of R4.3-billion.

Between July 2025 and March 2026, City Power reported 2.1 million forced interruptions. It took 11 hours on average to restore each one, and customers went without electricity for an average of 20.6 hours over the period. In some cases they went without for weeks. Sixty percent of outages were caused by deteriorating and outdated networks, and City Power puts its infrastructure backlog at R44.25-billion.

Many of the mayoral candidates have argued for collapsing some or all of the City’s entities back into the municipal administration. But, while the sentiment is understandable, this is the wrong approach at this time.

Collapsing them now will create far more challenges than any possible benefits that may eventually materialise. It would change where the functions sit without addressing the problems that have left the utilities unable to deliver, and it would bog down the entire city administration in a very big restructuring process when what is required is the urgent restoration of reliable service delivery.

That does not mean the current arrangement is sacred. It is not clear whether the ideal approach in the long run is to allow City Power to continue as a separate entity. But that is a question to settle from a position of strength rather than crisis.