South Africa: City Power Seeks Army Help Against Copper Thieves - South African News Briefs - October 16, 2026
City Power, Johannesburg's electricity utility, is asking the South African National Defence Force to step in and help protect its infrastructure from copper cable thieves. The request comes as theft continues to knock out power across the city, leaving residents and businesses in the dark for hours, sometimes days, at a time.
The scale of the problem is serious enough that a civilian utility is now turning to the military for backup. Copper theft has long plagued South Africa's power grid, but City Power's appeal signals that the situation in Johannesburg has reached a point where conventional security measures are simply not holding up.
No timeline has been confirmed for when or how the defence force might get involved, but the ask itself tells a story. For a city already stretched by load shedding and ageing infrastructure, losing cables to organised theft is a compounding crisis that ordinary security responses have not been able to crack. Watch this space.
Originally published by AllAfrica · info@allafrica.com (allAfrica).