For more than a year, South Africans endured scheduled power cuts that became a grim part of daily life. Rolling blackouts paralysed businesses, disrupted schools, and pushed millions of households into the dark for hours each day. But in recent months, the state power utility Eskom declared the end of load shedding — a milestone celebrated across the country as a sign that the worst of the electricity crisis had passed.
That relief, however, has proved short-lived for many communities. While national demand is now being met without planned outages, a parallel and deeply entrenched problem has resurfaced: electricity theft on an industrial scale. Across South Africa’s townships, informal settlements, and even some peri-urban areas, illegal connections to the power grid have surged. These unauthorised links — often crudely installed and highly dangerous — are overloading local transformers, triggering spontaneous outages, and putting lives at risk.
The scale of the problem is staggering. Estimates from the South African Local Government Association suggest that municipal electricity distribution losses — the vast majority of which are attributable to theft rather than technical faults — have reached levels that strain already precarious municipal budgets. Revenue lost to theft is forcing some municipalities to reduce maintenance on legitimate infrastructure, creating a vicious cycle of deteriorating service for paying customers.
Community leaders in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provinces report that illegal connections have become not just common but normalised. In some areas, informal settlement dwellers explain that they have no choice — formal connections are prohibitively expensive or simply unavailable for those living on land not designated for residential use. This speaks to a deeper failure of urban planning and service delivery that successive governments have failed to resolve.
The safety implications are equally alarming. Last month, three people were killed in the Johannesburg township of Soweto when an overloaded pole collapsed after dozens of households had tapped into a single transformer line. Fire brigades report a sharp rise in structure fires caused by faulty illegal wiring. Eskom has warned that the practice of hooking directly onto high-voltage lines is a matter of when, not if, someone will be killed.
For policymakers, the challenge is formidable. Simply removing illegal connections without offering legal alternatives drives people further into energy poverty. Yet turning a blind eye rewards criminal networks that often charge residents a monthly fee to maintain their pirate connections — a cottage industry that has grown into a significant underground economy. Tackling the problem requires both enforcement and investment in expanding grid access to underserved communities. Until both happen simultaneously, South Africa’s electricity crisis — now wearing a different mask — will persist.