Johannesburg electricity utility City Power says it is making its senior managers work this weekend “so that we can collectively experience the pain” after numerous power cuts in Randburg and Hursthill.

In a statement on Saturday, spokesperson Isaac Mangena said the power cuts had been caused by load-shedding, cable theft, equipment failure, cable faults and damage to equipment.

Eskom has been load-shedding for most of the week and will continue doing so at stage 2 until 5am on Monday, according to its latest update on Thursday.

But Mangena said City Power had been struggling with “multiple outages” caused by other problems in Randburg and Hursthill.

“We have deployed additional resources from the planned maintenance and test branch department, to support Randburg and Hursthill teams,” he said.

“We also noted that the information flow as well as the integrity of information from regional service delivery centres to the customer centre needs improvement.”

Communications with Eskom also needed improvement, said Mangena.

“This is highlighted by an outage that occurred on the Eskom side of the network affecting several substations under Randburg, especially the Windsor substation and several residential areas in Randburg.

“It took the power utility a while before switching on electricity on their side, causing City Power customers to suffer a prolonged power loss, made worse by load-shedding that followed.”

Apologising to consumers, Mangena added: “For this weekend and until all outages are resolved, City Power senior managers have been asked to report for duty, so that we can collectively experience the pain that customers and ward councillors go through when there is no power.”

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