Joburg burns, politicians bargain

Résumé détaillé

As City Power’s grid buckles and coalition talks heat up, Johannesburg’s voters deserve more than another deal for political survival. What would a people-first coalition look ...

As City Power’s grid buckles and coalition talks heat up, Johannesburg’s voters deserve more than another deal for political survival. What would a people-first coalition look like?

As political leaders bicker and early signs point to a largely stay-the-same coalition government for Johannesburg, the city grid is exploding. Both the Garden City Clinic and the SABC, along with more than 20,000 residents, have been affected by serial fires at the Mayfair/Brixton substation, while Alexandra was also without power. The facilities have alternative electricity systems to keep essential services running, but are still hobbled.

This is the backdrop to City coalition negotiations characterised by heat not light, by ego not service, if initial social media posts are anything to go by. The charts show 574 incidents of outages across the city in October, and the substation fire affecting the expanded Ward 58 and environs could see a prolonged outage. A major blaze early on Sunday morning (8 November) heavily damaged seven cables, a transformer and vital electrical panels.

Alexandra has the highest total number of blackouts, followed by Randburg. The sprawling Alex, with an estimated 179,000 residents, has seven wards, with one controlled by the DA and one by the IFP. The ANC kept control in the other five wards, but with, on average, declines of 20 percentage points from the 2021 election.

The reason for the high number of outages is that Joburg’s electricity grid is in a death spiral and has been for years. This must be Item 1 of any incoming administration, which has two weeks to complete coalition talks.

The Joburg Crisis Alliance (JCA), an umbrella alliance of 57 residents and peoples’ associations, warned political parties negotiating Johannesburg’s next coalition government to respect voters’ choices rather than trade positions for political power.

“The people of Johannesburg have spoken,” the alliance said on Wednesday, 11 November.

We’ve designed what a people’s choice-led…

In…

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