Johannesburg utility City Power plans to impose steep fines on those who connect to the Johannesburg power grid illegally, in efforts to recoup non-technical losses that amount to about R2-billion a year.

The move also follows the fatal electrocution of two people in Crosby, during which City Power discovered that the house the people were renting had a tampered meter and was missing earth leakage protection.

In the last financial year, City Power had been made aware of 16 fatalities and several injuries caused by illegal activities on the network.

The electricity entity conducted 52 operations to remove illegal connections in the last financial year, and executed more than 17 000 electricity cut-offs at the properties of nonpaying customers in the second half of the last financial year.

City Power faces the huge challenge of stemming meter tempering, illegal connections, theft of electricity, vandalism and theft of infrastructure.

Legislators have agreed to empower the courts to impose harsher sentences on criminals who tamper with national infrastructure. An amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1997 and the Criminal Matters Amendment Act of 2015 now allows for the imposition of a severe penalty, such as between three and 30 years’ imprisonment.

Meter tampering, for example, may result in criminal charges being laid against an offender. Tampering is an activity that includes altering, cutting, disturbing, interfering with, interrupting, manipulating, obstructing, removing or uprooting, by any means, method or device, an essential infrastructure, or component of the essential infrastructure, which provides a basic service.

In less serious cases, City Power may cut the offender’s electricity and remove the relevant electricity infrastructure, until they pay a reconnection fee penalty of between R10 000 and R50 000 when they apply for a reconnection.

Not only are illegal connections a violation of municipal bylaws and a danger to people but they cause overloading on mini-substations and pole-mounted transformers, which eventually explode and burn, leaving residents without power for several hours if not days before replacement infrastructure can be installed.