Everything Is Broken

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Tonight I was outside in the garden and noticed we were the only house around that had any lights on. Ever since we had solar installed 12 months ago I have not paid much attention to what is happening in the area with regard to power supply. The only time it was a concern was during load shedding and whether or not I would have enough battery so all it required was to adjust some system settings.

When I looked on the City Power website it highlighted that my area had been down for 21 hours and that they were in the process of final testing. This is nearly a full day of no power and my solar has coped quite comfortably which is a very good sign.

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This update was 15 hours ago lol.

Last week there were another 2 outages in the area being 3 and 5 hours which again I was oblivious to this going on. You start to realise that not much has changed with regard to services and how lucky you are not knowing and living a total different life to the rest of the residents in the area.

Load shedding has not showed it's ugly head for quite some time even though recently they announced Johannesburg would experience a 14 hour session very soon. I am not sure if that would be executed in one hit or over a few days and is a reminder that the underlying problems still do exist even if it is not so severe as what we had in the past.

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This is a report on City Power who provides our electricity supply to our area and is owned by the City of Johannesburg municipality. This is a state owned utility solely responsible for the local infrastructure purchasing power from Eskom (SOE) and reselling on to the residents. There is a decent mark up so this in theory should be a great business yet those in charge somehow manage to cock things up.

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The latest report highlights there are currently over 464 open faults of which 375 of those are now over the 24 hour period. Now you throw in the call center phone lines being down and you have one huge prized cock up unfolding.

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Everyone knows that this is not forma lack of funding and more about where the funding is going. If you are over spending your received revenue by more than R2 billion which received revenue will be more than the budget then the problem is rather severe.

A recent report stated that 42% of all the electricity City Power purchases is lost through theft or fraud which I know from first hand knowledge most of this is happening from within City Power itself. When you have call center staff driving brand new BMW X6's and this is their only source of income you have serious stuff happening internally.

Last week it was reported that contractors had not been paid with some having not bene paid for 9 months. This is why the repairs are not happening in a timeously manner because they do not have the extra teams assisting. if the contractors have not been paid then this is probably down to the City of Johannesburg not having any funds left due to spending it on the areas where the G20 summit was being held.

Nothing is working from traffic lights, street lights, large pot holes in the roads and the list goes on and on. This weekend I was driving and was not sure what I drove through whether it was an intersection or just badly maintained roads. When i looked again i had driven through a traffic intersection that had no traffic lights besides one traffic light pole remaining. There were no road markings or signs telling you vital traffic information and shows you can be the most experienced driver around and be found wanting in these conditions.

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