City urges Alexandra residents to pay for electricity at community imbizo

City leaders and City Power officials used an electricity imbizo in Alexandra to press residents to pay for the electricity they use, and to explain how non-payment is affecting the utility and wider municipal services.

Who spoke and where

Executive Mayor Dada Morero addressed residents at City Power’s electricity imbizo held at AlexSan Kopano on August 18. Morero said the city’s most important task is ensuring every household has access to electricity while also urging residents to buy electricity.

Why payment matters, officials said

Morero told the gathering:

“It is very important for us as a municipality to make sure that people buy electricity because it will help us a lot going forward. The more we buy electricity, the more the municipality will be able to do other things.”

The imbizo was described as the first in a series of similar engagements the city plans to roll out in different regions to give residents a platform to raise concerns and for officials to explain measures to improve the electricity network.

Residents raised reliability and infrastructure concerns

Scores of residents attended and voiced frustrations about frequent outages and an unreliable network. Discussion topics included recurring power cuts, network overloading, illegal connections, meter tampering and non-payment for services.

Ward 76 resident Lizzy Sithole was quoted at the meeting:

“The Alex community is not refusing to pay for electricity, but you must do the right thing. The electricity infrastructure is old. You must repair it.”

City Power’s revenue shortfall

The imbizo forms part of a broader push by City Power to shore up revenue collection. According to The Citizen, City Power CEO Charles Tlouane previously said the utility spends roughly R250m a month supplying electricity through the Alexandra network, yet collects only about R29m in return, a recovery rate of just 11.6%, leaving a monthly shortfall of around R221m. Tlouane said the situation is unsustainable and that City Power must both improve reliability and close the gap between consumption and payment.

Call for collective effort

Deputy Mayor and MMC for Finance Loyiso Masuku urged cooperation:

“Service delivery works best when communities work together with the government. Service delivery is something we must all collectively work for.”

Morero also said the city cross-subsidises infrastructure repairs and development across the municipality using surpluses generated by entities such as City Power and Johannesburg Water, and added:

“It is very important that we pay for electricity and water.”

Next steps

Morero acknowledged the long list of grievances raised by residents and committed to spending time in Alexandra that month to work through the issues raised at the imbizo.

About the reporting

According to The Citizen, City Power’s electricity imbizo drew scores of residents and focused on revenue collection and service reliability. According to The Citizen, since 2003, Alex News has been the voice of the community and delivers news and advertising messages to 15 000 doorsteps in Alex twice a month on a Thursday. According to The Citizen, At Caxton, every story is written by humans. We use AI only to perform quality checks – never to generate the news.