Load-shedding is receding as a national emergency, yet Johannesburg still can’t keep its own lights on. Between July 2025 and March this year City Power recorded 2.1-million forced interruptions. On average it took 11 hours to restore each fault, and the typical customer spent more than 20 hours without power over those nine months. Some went without power for weeks.

City Power is the sharpest illustration of a crisis running through the city’s utilities, and it is one of the critical areas where the next mayor’s credibility will be won or lost. With the local government election on November 4, some candidates have reached for a tempting answer: collapse City Power, Joburg Water and Pikitup back into the city administration and be done with “entities”. It is the wrong answer, and understanding why points to the right one.

Start with the diagnosis. City Power is trapped in a doom loop. It cannot generate enough cash to maintain a decaying network, so maintenance is deferred, the network fails more often, losses climb, customers find alternatives and there is even less cash than before. Its internal overdraft with the city had reached about R19.1bn by March; its own estimate of the infrastructure backlog is R44.25bn. The utility is no longer managing its assets. It is managing their decline.

The second problem is that much of the electricity City Power buys never becomes money. As electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa put it, for every R100 of bulk purchases the utility reticulates about R70. Thirty rand is gone before a single bill is collected, lost to ageing infrastructure, theft, illegal connections and broken metering. Then collection itself fails: meter-reading runs at 72% against a 98% target, tens of thousands of accounts generate no bill at all. Customers (households, firms, provincial government) owe City Power some R13.3bn.

The third problem is people. In 2024/25 44% of City Power’s professional engineering posts and 72% of its senior technician posts stood vacant, some for more than two years. Leadership has churned continuously since 2017; the utility today runs with an acting CEO. When it finally advertised for a permanent CEO this year, it quietly watered down the requirements, downgrading an engineering degree and professional registration from a requirement to a “nice to have”. Of the 12 people on its board, just one has an engineering background. You cannot run a R27bn electricity business this way.

Folding these operations back into the city would not address any of the core problems. The municipal administration is itself financially strained and short of skills; it is in no position to absorb large, technically demanding utilities and run them better. A full restructuring would swallow scarce management attention for years — precisely when electricity, water and refuse need urgent, hands-on repair. It would change where the functions sit without changing why they fail. The honest course is to stabilise the utilities first and decide their long-term institutional form later, from a position of strength rather than crisis.

So what should the next administration actually do? Four things, in sequence.

– Fix the leadership. This is not a platitude; it is the precondition for everything else. The city, as shareholder, should rebuild City Power’s board around engineering, financial and utility expertise rather than political loyalty, appoint a credible chairperson, and then hold the executive to a small set of measurable targets. Where the skills do not exist in the public sector, recruit them from the private sector or retired Eskom engineers that have them. Without merit appointments at the top, nothing below will hold.

– Give City Power control over its own money. Today the revenue from electricity sales is swept into the city’s central account and a portion handed back, so there is no clear link between what the utility earns, what it costs to run and what it has to spend. The city has promised a 70:30 revenue split, but nobody can say what that ratio is based on, or whether 70% is enough. The answer is a practical form of ringfencing: predictable cash for City Power, transparent and budgeted transfers to the city, and an end to ad hoc raids on utility accounts. This is exactly what the National Treasury’s new Metro Trading Services Reform rewards. There is a R54bn incentive pool that pays metros to ringfence services, establish single points of accountability and invest in infrastructure. Johannesburg should compete hard for that money. The reform it needs and the funding on offer point in the same direction.

– Rebuild revenue collection — and the trust on which it depends. Trust between residents and all of the entities has been broken. Residents will not pay bills they believe are wrong, and City Power cannot fix its finances while alienating the customers it most needs. It needs to communicate better with residents through town hall meetings, set strict deadlines to address problems and implement a plan to meet them. The utility should reconcile customer, property and meter records, run a professional customer-service and billing-dispute centre, and start in the areas where nonpayment is worst. It must distinguish those who cannot pay from those who will not, and keep an accurate indigent register so poor households actually receive free basic electricity. Then payment must be enforced firmly and consistently against everyone else, no matter who they are or who they know. City Power should give solar customers a reason to stay on the grid, making feed-in work at scale while charging a fair fee for the network they still rely on. Disconnection should be the last step of a credible process, not an immediate, arbitrary reflex.

– Bring in the private sector — deliberately, not as more of the same outsourcing that has too often meant paying contractors for work not done or that could have been done in house if experienced professionals had been appointed in the first place. We propose a two-speed approach. In the near term, use simple, lawful contracts to attack specific failures: smart-prepaid metering and revenue protection in the highest-loss zones, meter-reading and billing clean-ups tied to verified results. In parallel, prepare the larger, slower deals — privately financed substation and network renewal — that the city cannot fund from its own balance sheet. All of it must rest on professional contract management, which requires disclosed ownership, payment linked to independently verified outcomes, and real consequences for failure.

None of this needs to wait for the perfect plan. The first 100 days should stabilise leadership, secure the cash and stop the bleeding in a handful of target areas. This would make for visible progress that residents can see and that builds credibility for the harder reforms behind it.

This is demanding, unglamorous work, and it will meet resistance from those who have made the utilities their fiefdoms. But it is achievable within the existing system if the political will is there. Before they vote on November 4, voters should press every party and candidate on one question above the noise: not whether they will “fix” City Power, but precisely how they will restore its leadership, its finances and its ability to deliver. Johannesburg’s recovery — and the country’s — depends on the answer.

Bernstein is executive director of the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE). This article is based on ‘Powering Joburg’s Turnaround’, the fourth report in a new CDE series: Johannesburg Matters: Fixing South Africa’s Growth Engine.

This article was published on Business Day