No crisis as new contractors come on board at City Power

City Power informed customers they had made changes to their contractual work arrangements after the end of the term of the old contractors last month.

City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said it was worth noting that the actual term for these contractors ended almost three years ago. They renewed the contracts on a three-month basis until new contractors could come on board.

A court process guided City Power in this process.

“We have onboarded new contractors since June 1. Our residents should know there is no crisis, as suggested in the messages circulating.

“The new team of contractors started on June 1 and hit the ground running across all our service delivery centres (SDCs). With the new contractors, we are responding to and addressing some of our customers’ concerns regarding the shoddy workmanship by contractors, which we saw ourselves when we did quality controls after the work. However, it also came up many times in our meetings with the residents.

“As City Power, we keep reinventing ourselves to ensure efficiency and quality of service to our customers. The new contractors will be held to high standards, and customers will see the changes soon. Some previous contractors were not accredited by industry bodies to do certain work, which is the loophole we are closing.

“The new contractors are CIDB-qualified and accredited to provide turnkey solutions, which means we will save time and resources, leading to quicker turnaround times. Most of them have worked with City Power on our network, doing projects such as electrification and maintenance, so we are confident they will rise to the challenge.

“We have also recently seen some of the old contractors implicated and arrested for theft and vandalism of our infrastructure, so we have increased the screening of the new ones and trained them on our ethical standards.

“We acknowledge that with every new onboarding, there will be glitches and system shocks. But we assure our residents there will be no disruptions in our operations, and outages will be attended to as quickly as they should.
“We also want to indicate that, over and above these new contractors, we have reinforced internal resources with about 120 new technicians recruited since February.

“We have also onboarded a parallel productivity team to ensure we maintain clearly defined standards. We strictly enforce quality control measures and ensure we restore electricity within 24 hours, with minimal interruptions to our customers.

“Sustained higher stages of load-shedding compounded by the winter peak period do not help, but we are ready with more resources and material brought to different SDCs to deal with the outage backlogs in different areas,” explained Mangena.