The electricity outages within the City of Mbombela (CoM) are allegedly caused by substandard work done by service providers contracted by the municipality. The spokesperson for CoM, Joseph Ngala, confirmed that there are challenges with the supply of electricity to the City. These range from cable theft, obsolete secondary plants and aged primary plants.

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“The network has aged, with the Delta Substation and Steiltes Substation being the worst. The City has made funds available for refurbishing these assets, as well as several switching stations. The sabotage of the network is for now a suspicion.  

It is suspected that some of the service providers do poor work on purpose. Some of our personnel are also suspected in these works of sabotage, there will be an investigation that the accounting officer has sanctioned and only after the outcomes of that investigation can the suspicions be confirmed. The energy department is currently tightening supervision in all installation work,” he said.

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Ngala also said they have funds set aside to upgrade the old electricity infrastructure within the City. “We recently experienced cable theft in the City and that caused an unnecessary developmental backlog, because funds that were supposed to have been used on other projects had to be used to replace the stolen cables. We also have the issue of vandalism of the infrastructure, with which we need to deal. The City tries to protect such infrastructure where possible, but the thieves always devise new strategies,” said Ngala.