- City Power currently has no contracted security presence protecting its electricity infrastructure.
- This occurs while two major security tenders have yet to be publicly announced.
- 17 mini-substations have been vandalised in Randburg in the last four weeks, affecting electricity supply to residents.
Johannesburg’s electricity infrastructure is being vandalized. The ANC-led government must answer serious questions about who is actually protecting it.
The DA can reveal that City Power currently has no contracted security presence protecting its electricity infrastructure, and no security patrol vehicles are operating across the network.
If City Power disputes this, it must immediately disclose who is contracted, what they are being paid, and where guards and response teams are deployed.
This occurs while two major security tenders have yet to be publicly announced and are still awaiting feedback.
Bid 2622S, for guarding, armed response and tactical security, closed on 22 April. Bid 2605GS, covering CCTV, access control, alarms and intrusion-detection systems, closed on 19 June.
Meanwhile, communities are paying the price.
Information we gathered shows that 17 mini-substations have been vandalised in Randburg in just four weeks, with affected communities waiting an average of approximately eight days for replacement.
That means families without electricity and businesses are losing trading time, stock and income.
Seventeen vandalised mini-substations in four weeks should set alarm bells ringing.
We will write to City Power demanding answers on both tenders, all current security contracts, expenditure, deployments and what measures are currently protecting critical infrastructure.
The ANC-led government cannot continually blame vandalism for prolonged outages while failing to account for the security residents are paying for.
In accordance with our Manifesto 2026, a DA-led Johannesburg government would keep the lights on by reinvesting electricity revenue into electrical infrastructure, maintaining grids, enabling municipalities to buy and sell their own power, and supporting households and businesses that can feed electricity back into the system.
Johannesburg cannot keep paying for security and then paying again to replace stolen and vandalised infrastructure.