City Power fixing vandalised streetlights 'on a daily basis'
City Power said on Thursday that it lost R114 million due to the theft and vandalism of its infrastructure in the previous financial year.
Since the start of this year, at least 235 arrests have been made for cable theft and vandalism in the city.
Amongst those arrested include the utility's contractors and employees, some of whom
have since been dismissed.
The utility briefed the media in Fordsburg, Johannesburg on Thursday.
City Power CEO Tshifularo Mashava said it's worrying that some of the arrested suspects are employees of the entity.
Mashava blamed non-functioning streetlights in the city on vandalism and cable theft.
"We fix streetlights on a daily basis, but they get chopped daily basis. We then proposed to have a bare conductor, as opposed to that ABC conductor. Because the aerial bundle conductor, simply that gets harvested for illegal connection.”
Mashava said they working to overhaul the city's more than 200,000 streetlights.
"So, it's not possible for us to do an overhaul at once. So we've started with the risky areas, the hot spots, and we are ensuring that we've got the bare conductor.
"But we've also been intentional in saying, let's rather go and position solar high masts in most of those areas. And the solar high-masts are more durable.
"So, we have started a programme. We've already installed over 200 of those lights.”
Last week, President Cyril Ramaphosa expressed his concern over the high rate of non-functioning streetlights in the city during his oversight visit to the country's economic hub.
Mashava said streetlights outages are also due to power outages from Eskom side.
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