Johannesburg’s electricity supply is now genuinely at risk, and the country’s organised business community is sounding the alarm with growing urgency. Business Leadership South Africa CEO Busi Mavuso used her weekly newsletter on Monday to deliver one of her starkest warnings yet — that the city’s R5.3 billion debt to Eskom is not being resolved in a sustainable way, and that the consequences of inaction are no longer theoretical.
The immediate trigger is a missed payment deadline. Eskom had granted Johannesburg a 30-day reprieve from its Promotion of Administrative Justice Act process — the legal procedure the utility must follow before it can cut electricity supply to the city. That reprieve, brokered by Electricity and Energy Minister Kgosientsho Ramakgopa, unravelled when Johannesburg failed to pay its current account by 5 June, despite having paid R1.2 billion toward its arrears since the PAJA process began. Eskom has now resumed the legal process, and a cut to City Power’s supply is once again a live possibility.
“The R5.3bn debt that the city owes to Eskom is not being resolved in a sustainable way,” Mavuso said. “South Africa cannot afford for Johannesburg to fail, and the city’s electricity supply is now genuinely at risk.”
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The numbers behind the city’s predicament are sobering. BLSA’s analysis shows Johannesburg is nearly a year late on average in paying its suppliers. The city consistently fails to collect the revenue it projects in its own budgets. Capital maintenance is chronically underfunded, and the budget is consumed by consumption spending rather than the infrastructure investment that residents and businesses depend on. The infrastructure renewal backlog across City Power, Joburg Water, and the Johannesburg Roads Agency alone exceeds R185 billion.
Mavuso described the Johannesburg debt as one symptom of a much broader pattern of municipal mismanagement that organised business has been flagging for years. “This debt is one symptom among many of the city’s mismanagement that organised business has flagged as a critical risk to the broader economy,” she said. Johannesburg contributes approximately 16% to South Africa’s GDP and accounts for roughly 40% of Gauteng’s economic activity. The BLSA Council met this week to assess the situation and consider how business can support the city’s recovery.
Beyond the immediate Johannesburg crisis, Mavuso used the newsletter to press a wider point about the direction of South Africa’s electricity reform agenda. She argued that resolving municipal debt and completing structural electricity reform are not separate conversations — they are interdependent. “Restoring Eskom’s financial position matters beyond Johannesburg,” she wrote. “It is essential to stabilising Eskom and delivering the competitive electricity market we have been working toward.”
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Central to that reform is the establishment of a genuinely independent transmission system operator. Mavuso was direct on what independence must mean in practice: the entity must own the grid’s assets, not merely operate them on Eskom’s behalf. “An operator that runs the grid but doesn’t own it is like asking a competitor in a race to also act as the umpire,” she said. President Cyril Ramaphosa backed this interpretation in his February State of the Nation Address, and the Presidency reiterated the position earlier this month. A task team has been given until the end of June to publish its report on the unbundling.
The stakes of getting this right extend beyond governance. Since load-shedding first struck 18 years ago, electricity prices have increased tenfold, far outpacing inflation. The price increases have eroded the competitiveness of energy-intensive manufacturing sectors and accelerated deindustrialisation. Mavuso argued that reversing this trajectory requires a genuinely competitive market — with multiple suppliers competing for customers under a transmission operator that all parties can trust — and not reform in name only.
Business, she made clear, is prepared to be a constructive partner — but that partnership has conditions. “Business stands ready to support credible public sector partners who are prepared to deliver,” she said. “But that support is premised on a real commitment to following through on established policy, because policy follow-through is what will restore economic growth.”
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The PAJA clock is ticking. If Johannesburg cannot demonstrate credible progress on its Eskom obligations, the prospect of City Power facing supply interruptions moves from a legal technicality to an operational reality. For a city whose dysfunction is already a drag on the national economy, that is a risk South Africa cannot afford to take.