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City Power offices in Johannesburg.
City Power in Johannesburg says the inner city is largely stable despite recent power outages affecting residents in suburbs such as Bellevue, Kensington and Cyrildene.
Community members say the outages, which have lasted several days in some areas, have disrupted their daily lives.
The power utility says only a few circuits at the Observatory and Bellevue substations were affected, due to cable theft, equipment failure and water damage.
City Power’s Chief Operational Officer, Charles Tlouane, says, “The unfortunate part is that we’ve got R44 billion worth of backlog. With only R1.2 billion budget of capital injection across the entire city, not in the city only, across the seven regions of Johannesburg. R44 billion versus R1 billion. You’ll see where we should redirect funds. How do we make sure that everybody else is covered within the limited budget? So, we’re trying to do more with less. And this is where we are currently. But we are responding to those challenges.”
#CityPowerUpdates #InnerCitySDC
Kindly find the attached outage update for InnerCitySDC.^KM pic.twitter.com/yVyDzjF2C5
— @CityPowerJhb (@CityPowerJhb) January 20, 2026
