Across parts of KwaZulu-Natal, residents are sitting without electricity after repeated damage to transformers caused by illegal connections and power theft. Eskom has made it clear that it will not continue replacing infrastructure in areas where losses remain uncontrolled. While the position may be financially defensible, its impact is being felt most sharply by law-abiding households who pay for electricity but are now left in the dark.
In essence it means that communities are suffering for the crimes of a few. As the report in yesterday’s Witness notes, residents have been told they must now “pool together funds to replace damaged transformers”. This is plainly unfair.
As one resident protested “You can’t punish the entire community just because someone within the community has broken the law.” Eskom’s approach is ethically wrong because it punishes people who have done nothing wrong. Households that pay their bills and use electricity legally are being denied a basic service because of the actions of others. Electricity is essential for daily life, affecting health, schooling and livelihoods.
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Withholding supply from law-abiding consumers shifts the impact of crime onto innocent people, which is neither fair nor proportionate. At the same time, the collapse of infrastructure is not innocuous. Illegal connections and tampering overload transformers, drain resources, and threaten public safety.
The answer lies not in punishing entire communities, but in creating shared but fair responsibility. Service providers must prioritise restoring supply for compliant households — even if that requires isolating problem areas, investing in tamper-resistant transformers or smart metering, and strengthening monitoring systems. Communities, for their part, should be encouraged to act as custodians of public infrastructure: reporting tampering, discouraging theft, and supporting communal efforts to protect equipment.
The current approach not only burdens innocent people with the consequences of crime but it worsens inequality by placing the heaviest impact on poorer communities that have the least ability to cope without electricity. Prolonged outages fuel anger and resentment between social groups. A caring government needs to rethink how electricity is shared and used to empower communities.
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