A plea by Joburg City Power to call in the country’s armed forces to step into the crisis which saw at least six suburbs plunged into darkness and a raging fire over a major arterial route seems like a drastic measure.
Preliminary investigations found that “criminal elements had targeted the copper cable” that caught fire in the tunnels near Smit Street and the double-decker section of the M1 highway on Tuesday night, while the thieves made off with 300 metres of copper wire.
The fire caused an in-rush current of air that tripped the Fordsburg Bulk Intake Substation shutting off power to Braamfontein, Parkview, Parktown, Melville, Amalgam and Vrededorp. It closed parts of the M1 for two days and resulted in a shoot-out between the copper thieves and the City Power security team who tried to gain access to the source of the fire.
While copper theft seriously jeopardises our economic stability, the presence of the army will be akin to mounting a plaster cast on a deeply infected wound.
It also threatened the open gas turbine substation that City Power launched last month, spending R100m to refurbish.
According to one scrap metal recycling business, copper sells for R120 — R165 per kilogram, which means the 300 metres of stolen cable would fetch about R7,500.
Power is yet to be restored to all the areas.
Hence the plea this past week by City Power CEO Tshifularo Mashava to national police commissioner Lt-Gen Fannie Masemola to call in the troops to neutralise the threat and stop the theft and vandalism crippling the city’s power supply infrastructure.
In her appeal to Masemola, Mashava explained that cable theft and vandalism were “escalating unabatedly” in Johannesburg and were threatening to destabilise the city’s power supply completely.
The cost of the crisis for the current financial year to date, is an eye-watering R160m.
South Africa’s Illicit Copper Economy, a research report released in December 2023 by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC), reveals the pressure copper theft places on the country’s economy and society.
The same organisation’s Strategic Organised Crime Risk Assessment report for South Africa, released in September 2022, concluded that the country’s infrastructure is at a tipping point, with copper theft identified as a contributing factor.
That earlier report delves into 15 interconnected illicit markets which are, it says, driven by a “complex and evolving” criminal underground. These organised crime syndicates range from illegal firearms, wildlife crime and kidnapping to illicit drugs, illegal mining and organised corruption.
And when you realise the economic impact of copper theft on South Africa’s rail and electricity networks alone was more than R45bn in 2021/22, posing a substantial threat to the country's National Infrastructure Plan 2050, the call for the army seems a little more understandable.
Masemola's response was to instruct the Gauteng police commissioner to intervene by getting the Johannesburg economic infrastructure task team to work with City Power security to devise a joint operational plan.
The response is typical — slapping a plaster on a gushing injury.
The army is deployed at the instruction of the president as was the case during the civil unrest in July 2021. While the boots were on the ground, it remains uncertain whether their deployment defused the looting and violence or whether these died down on instruction from the masterminds.
And while copper theft seriously jeopardises our economic stability, the presence of the army will be akin to mounting a plaster cast on a deeply infected wound.
The more effective solution lies in addressing the source through legislation, law enforcement and international channels — seeing that most of our copper lands up abroad.
Government needs to step up intervention through the scrap metal policy, policing of our ports and amendments to the second-hand goods act to stem the unmitigated plunder.
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