Africa-Press – South-Africa. City Power terminated 110 teams of contractors in the City of Johannesburg on Wednesday, sparking fears that residents would suffer even more amid ongoing load shedding and power outages.
However, City Power’s spokesperson Isaac Mangena said new contractors had already started working on Thursday.
“The new contractors will be held to higher standards, and customers will see some of the changes in the work done for them. Some previous contractors were not credited by industry bodies to do certain work on our network, which is the loophole that City Power is closing.
“The new contractors are … qualified and credited to provide 10 key solutions, which is really to reduce the amount of time we spend on outages and save us on resources,” said Mangena.
Ward 73 Councilor Eleanor Hugget said that while the contractors often didn’t do a good job, they did help.
“While these contractors often did a shoddy job, they at least could get out to an outage to see what was happening. And they had a repair truck.
Ward councillor Ralf Bittkau urged residents to support one another during this period.
“We are now facing an unprecedented situation where outages will continue to plague us for days, if not longer. The contingency allows for only seven contractors for the entire city,” said Bittkau.
Mangena said the term of the old contractors ended three years ago and was renewed on a three-month basis until new contractors could be sourced.
“The new teams started on 1 June and have already [hit] the ground running. With the new contractors, we are also addressing some of our customers’ concerns,” said Mangena.
Mangena said most of the new contractors had worked with City Power on bigger projects such as electrification and maintenance.
News24 previously reported that a contractor had been arrested for allegedly sabotaging a substation in Johannesburg and nearly killing technicians working on the same network nearby.
According to City Power CEO Tshifularo Mashava, the man was found inside a switching substation in the Roodepoort area with working equipment.
The act of sabotage nearly killed City Power operators and technicians working on the network downstream from the same switching station, said Mashava.
Mangena said the company’s investigations revealed that several contractors had been arrested for cable theft, selling cables, and vandalism.
He said: “[As a result] we have increased the screening of the new ones with training given on our ethical standards, among others.”
Mangena said the utility acknowledges there will be a few glitches and even system shocks with every new onboarding.
“But we assure our residents that there will be no disruptions and outages will be attended to as quickly as they should. We have empowered internal resources with about 120 000 new technicians recruited since February to ensure we beef up some of our team on the ground.
“We have also onboarded a parallel productivity team to ensure we stick to clearly defined standards and to ensure that we restore electricity within 24 hours with minimal or no disruptions to our customers,” said Mangena.
He added that the high stages of load shedding compounded with the winter peak period is not helping the utility.
“But we are ready with more resources … We’ll respond efficiently and quickly so that there are fewer disruptions to the lives of our customers,” said Mangena.
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