Benoni residents are running out of patience after ongoing outages have left them without electricity for days.
Some areas were left in the dark for nearly a week, while others were still waiting for restoration by Sunday morning. Reports indicate that it first blacked out on Friday night, 23 January, at around 9:30pm.
A resident told The Citizen that living without power for this long has not only negatively affected her business, which she runs from home, but also every other aspect of her life.
“My family is dependent on electricity; this is the pits, it’s fucking frustrating, and we just do not get answers,” they said.
Meanwhile, the City has attributed the latest major outage to damage on a 132 kV underground cable along Benoni’s Snake Road, linking the failure to illegal mining in the area.
According to the municipality, repeated blasting associated with illegal mining causes ground vibrations that weaken cable joints and insulation, increasing the risk of failure.
Illegal mining weakens cables
Ekurhuleni spokesperson Zweli Dlamini said illegal mining had also been linked to sinkholes in parts of the metro, including Brakpan, Snake Road and Primrose.
The Boksburg Rondebult sinkholes, still not repaired after four years, were among the first instances of the severity of infrastructure damage caused by illegal mining.
For residents, however, explanations do little to soften the daily reality of living without power, said Benoni ward councillor Mary Goby. She said the outage affected a wide portion of the suburb, with some residents without electricity for well over a week.
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Another resident shared. “Day 8 today, thank heavens I have a good solar system. Our only challenge is hot water; without electricity, my geyser does not heat up. But many people do not have backup power, and we feel so sorry for the people who don’t have solutions,” they said.
‘Clearly the City Manager is incapable of managing a major threat’
A business owner said that they do not understand why the city, the police or the military seemed incapable of stopping illegal miners.
“It is becoming a major problem. We hear them blasting all the time, law enforcement is a joke,” they said.
“Clearly, the City Manager is incapable of managing a major threat to the city.”
Residents have, over the past week, vented their frustration with the municipality on ward councillors, too, said Goby.
“Residents and businesses believe that councillors do not know what it is like living without power, but they do.”
She said even councillors who were not directly affected were fully aware of the hardship through constant communication from residents.
Tempers are flaring, and another Benoni ward councillor, Lornette Joseph, warned residents not to drive to the repair site and intimidate or interfere with technicians trying to solve the problem.
She wrote on a community message: “There is no estimated time of repair…. there is no indication of how long it will take or when we can expect feedback…. I would like to make it very clear that I will not, under any circumstances, give the addresses of where the teams are working. The last time the residents found where they were and threatened them and verbally abused them, the contractors went off-site and didn’t return; it was 2 weeks before a team would come back. I’m not willing to allow that.”
Heavy financial toll
The financial toll is also significant.
“One business alone put in around R80 000 worth of petrol for their generators so they could operate,” Goby said.
Goby raised questions about accountability, asking whether the true cause lay with “failing infrastructure, illegal miners or cable theft” and whether residents would ever get clear answers. She flagged illegal mining as a national problem and questioned what the national government was doing to address it.
Goby also pointed to cable theft and asked what was being done locally to prevent scrapyards from buying stolen metal and how their licences and operating hours were regulated.
She called for better lighting in high-risk areas and questioned the metro’s infrastructure maintenance and financial management.
“Benoni is one of the highest revenue-collecting areas in Ekurhuleni, but where’s our money?” she asked, adding that residents felt let down by multiple spheres of government.
While repair work on the damaged cable is underway, many in Benoni say the bigger issue is no longer a single outage, but a pattern of instability that is eroding trust.
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