Electricity thieves are driving Ferraris

Many affluent households that can afford to pay for their power are among the estimated 2.1 million electricity thieves, costing Eskom and municipalities billions of rand in lost revenue annually.

Pretoria metering company Impact Services has told Rapport’s Hanlie Retief that the firm identifies illegal connections in the affluent Waterkloof neighbourhood every week.

“They are driving Ferraris while stealing electricity. There is a culture of power theft,” said Impact senior manager Johan Hopley.

Hopley estimated that revenues for about 40% of electricity that the City of Tshwane bought from Eskom was not collected due to theft or unpaid bills.

Hopley’s comments follow several reports from municipalities that have caught affluent customers stealing electricity in the past few years.

In May 2024, Johannesburg’s City Power announced it had converted over 10,000 non-vending smart prepaid meters back to postpaid meters, mainly in high-end neighbourhoods and properties belonging to businesses.

The City of Tshwane also found several illegally-connected properties in affluent areas in March 2024.

In the middle-to-high-income area of Elardus Park, the city identified a property with an outstanding bill of R2.4 million.

One of the homes in Waterkloof Glen was on sale for R2.3 million, but its owners owed the municipality over R560,000, with the last payment received in 2020.

Tshwane also cracked down on illegal connections in Centurion’s Copperleaf Gold Estate in September 2022, where 600 homes were suspected of tampering with their meters.

In many cases, the biggest electricity thieves in Tshwane and Johannesburg are businesses.

Hopley’s comments were made in the context of the prepaid key revision number (KRN) rollover event on 24 November 2024.

Despite having over a decade’s warning, Eskom and municipalities failed to recode about 2.1 million prepaid meters on time for the deadline.

That left these meters unable to accept new electricity tokens unless a user or technician entered two key change tokens.

The vast majority of customers using these devices are suspected of being illegally connected or using tampered meters, as they had not bought loaded legally-vended electricity tokens for several months.

Eskom praising electricity thieves for doing the “right thing”

Eskom has dubbed these electricity thieves as “zero buyers” and said that around 400,000 of them had come forward to have their meters reconnected or repaired.

That came after the utility claimed to have opened up its recoding project to non-vending meters two days before the KRN rollover deadline through a “technical breakthrough.”

Industry sources have told MyBroadband that this claim is false and that the meters can always be updated.

Eskom distribution head Monde Bala said that the utility would continue to treat the electricity thieves with “dignity and respect” as it resolved these issues for all of them who did the “right thing”. 

Hopley also took issue with electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa seemingly praising these 400,000 customers for coming forward and expressed doubt over whether they would be converted into paying customers.

“I could originally not believe that I heard him correctly,” Hopley said. “Eskom is too afraid to attend to the thieves’ meters themselves because the communities intimidate and attack them.”

“Because the electricity thieves came forward, Eskom assumes they will get access to those 400,000 customers’ meters.”

“Before those meters are replaced or repaired, Eskom won’t get a cent of income from them.”

Hopley said a big problem was that Eskom and utilities stopped monitoring whether their customers were buying electricity regularly once they had prepaid meters.

He also said he could not understand why Eskom had not put together a task force that collaborated with municipalities to identify and punish electricity thieves.

He called on Eskom to prioritise electricity theft rather than impose big tariff hikes and restructuring to the detriment of paying customers.

“Replace the tampered meters and fine the guilty customer,” Hopley said.

“If it happens again, impose a bigger fine and remove the meter completely if they continue.”