Residents of Pietermaritzburg fiercely resisted the work of Eskom, which was disconnecting illegally connected power lines. Protesters blocked Lion Park road as Eskom employees, accompanied by police, headed to the disconnection site.
Residents of Pietermaritzburg fiercely resisted the work of Eskom, which was disconnecting illegally connected power lines. Protesters blocked Lion Park road as Eskom employees, accompanied by police, headed to the disconnection site.
The state energy company Eskom received a court order from the High Court of Pietermaritzburg authorizing the operation to dismantle transformers and cables. These connections were used by the community for electricity theft, estimated at approximately 14 million rand annually. During the operation, which began after a technical briefing at Eskom offices in Mohnedeni, objects, including burning tires, broken glass, and large tree branches, were thrown onto MR477 road.
Some residents who woke up early to prevent the company's actions claimed that the police shot them with rubber bullets during the protests. Eskom stated that it disconnected power to over 1400 households that had used illegal connections for the past 12 years.
An Eskom representative, Dadedabo Mbele, expressed hope for no opposition, noting that he does not believe thieves would want to continue stealing, nor does he think that residents of KZN possess such behavior. He emphasized that Eskom's task is to recover generation costs, as the company is not a commercial organization. The company made it clear that any resistance would not stop the operation, and residents would face temporary lack of electricity for cooking and using heaters in cold weather.
Other residents expressed dissatisfaction that the disconnection would deprive them of the opportunity to watch the World Cup semi-final between England and Argentina on Wednesday evening. Homes built using illegally connected energy are located on land that was transferred under the control of the Azibuye Emasisweni Amakhama Public Trust after legally demanding this land from various farmers.
Residents reported that they had applied for grid connection since 2018 and even collected funds to pay Eskom. However, Mbele refuted this, stating that Eskom could not connect electricity to homes built on land that had not been rezoned as residential. She clarified that the land has agricultural zoning, not residential, and therefore Eskom had not interacted with the trust on this matter.
Mbele reported that Eskom offered the trust a bulk supply option as a viable alternative while the trust handled the rezoning. She explained that a license is required to operate in a residential area, but this territory is a farm. The proposed bulk supply involved connecting all residents to one meter, and residents would have to make monthly contributions to the trust to pay the collective bill. Mbele added that Eskom presented information to the court about numerous interactions with the trust and proposed a solution while the rezoning process is underway.
Nevertheless, some residents rejected the bulk supply offer, fearing paying a single price regardless of consumption level. Eskom's Manager of Industry Relations and Stakeholders, Joyce Zingosi, reported that Eskom received an urgent injunction application from a group identifying themselves as Lion Park residents on June 4. Eskom stated its intention to oppose this ruling, and on June 5, 2026, the High Court of Pietermaritzburg dismissed the case and awarded costs to Eskom.
However, the trust chairman, Mlungisi Khanyezi, stated that Eskom provided the trust with too short a period to appeal the disconnection notice. He reported that they tried to convince Eskom to connect the residents, but the company only connected about five houses and closed the channel last year, providing them with court orders in just one day. Khanyezi stated that his lawyers are preparing documents in the High Court to stop this chaos, insisting that the lack of rezoning is not Eskom's issue, as they are the landowners and Eskom should connect the electricity if permitted by the owners.
One woman seen throwing stones onto the road to block the Eskom and police convoy recounted that she was heading to work as a nurse around 5 am when she learned about the impending disconnection. She returned home to change out of her uniform and join the protesters who were already blocking the road.
Sinokule Mthembu shared that after many years without electricity, she purchased transformers and cables and found electricians to illegally connect to the Eskom network. She questioned how one could live without electricity as a voter in South Africa and possess human rights. Her main concern was that she would not be able to prepare bottled milk for her baby. Mthembu also criticized politicians, stating that if politicians do not help them, they do not need their participation in local elections.
Eskom Chairman Mthetho Nyati stated that the organizations Business Leadership South Africa and Business Unity South Africa, which have long been the loudest critics of political interference in state-owned enterprises, themselves promote 'political interference' by insisting on transferring the network to an independent operator.
The CEO of BLSA, Busisiwe Mavuso, strongly objected to this position, stating that 'Nyati is fundamentally mistaken both regarding the motives behind our support and what proper governance requires from the Eskom board of directors.'
When looking at the situation without considering personal ambitions or grievances, a simple question arises: should a company that generates most of South Africa's electricity also own the network upon which its competitors depend?
A similar experiment was already conducted, and it was called Telkom, which cost the country a decade. For many years, Telkom functioned as a competitor in the retail telecommunications market while simultaneously owning the country's sole last-mile backbone. Anyone wishing to offer broadband or voice services was forced to purchase access from the very company it competed with.
The results of this period are publicly documented. Telkom was found guilty of abusing market power between 1999 and 2004, for which it paid a fine of 449 million rand. Furthermore, the company settled a second lawsuit concerning its conduct in 2005–2007, paying a fine of 200 million rand and agreeing to functionally separate its wholesale and retail divisions so that its wholesale division would treat its own retail business as 'just another customer,' as stated by the Competition Commission.
Regulators attempted to act as arbitrators. The government promised the decomposition of the local loop—opening up Telkom's copper network to competitors—and gave the company until November 2011 to comply with this requirement. However, when that month arrived, the communications regulator Icasa could only propose frameworks involving consultations, working groups, and a 'real data streaming product' by November 2012. None of this was implemented. The decomposition of the local loop was never implemented in South Africa—not in 2011, nor ever after.
In 2015, the company spun off its wholesale division as Openserve. It is noteworthy how the then-CEO Sipho Maseko described the logic of this step: 'Thanks to this separation and the creation of Openserve, we eliminate critical obstacles on our path to success.' He also noted that the Eskom board of directors could benefit from the phrase: 'Shared responsibility equals no responsibility.'
In other words, the monopoly itself eventually concluded that combining the roles of player and referee harms the company. But by then, the damage had been done. Telkom's competitors, lacking access to the copper infrastructure, spent years creating alternatives—Vumatel, Octotel, and Frogfoot laid fiber optic cables in the suburbs, while Telkom guarded a network whose value was eroding. Consumers paid for this lost decade with high prices and low speeds, and Telkom paid with fines, lawsuits, and diminished relevance.
The electricity situation is more dangerous than the telecommunications situation. In telecommunications, the market could eventually bypass the gatekeeper. Creating a competing fiber optic last-mile network is expensive but possible, and it happened. However, no one is going to build a competing 400kV transmission network through Karoo. Independent energy producers who do not have access to the grid have no workaround; they simply do not connect, and their projects remain in the queue. It is this limitation that hinders investment in renewable energy, which South Africa urgently needs, and therefore the competitive electricity market is the real target of the reform program.
Mavuso's argument is structural, not personal: an entity that is simultaneously a generator and a gatekeeper to the network relied upon by other generators has a conflict of interest embedded in its very structure. No board charter, however well drafted, will solve this problem.
To be fair to Nyati, his concerns are not frivolous. He asked in his post on X: 'These are the same bodies insisting on corporate governance and board independence. So what is the role of the SOE board? What exactly do they believe?' This is a valid observation, and his insistence that Eskom must develop renewable energy or face disappearance demonstrates a chairman who understands that the utility cannot survive without change.
The warning from Eskom CEO Dan Marokane that immediate legal separation could trigger cross-default conditions in credit agreements also deserves serious attention, even if, as Mavuso notes, bondholders worldwide have experienced similar restructurings before.
However, these are issues of consistency, and consistency issues have solutions. They are not arguments against separation, and—crucially—the decision has already been made.
President Cyril Ramaphosa publicly rejected the plan to maintain family control in February, stating that an independent transmission system operator 'will own and control the transmission assets and will be responsible for operating the electricity market.'
Business asserts that this requirement is now enshrined in law, in Section 34A of the Electricity Regulation Amendment Act. And the financial logic here is undeniable: an operator that owns nothing has no balance sheet, and without a balance sheet, it cannot attract the 440 billion rand needed to build more than 14,000 kilometers of new lines over the next decade.
The lesson Telkom teaches is not that separation happens easily. It is that delaying this process is the most expensive option for the country and, ultimately, for the company itself. Telkom fought for separation for ten years, watching the value of its protected network erode, and then accepted the separation as part of its own restructuring plan.
The Eskom board of directors must stop reviewing settled policy and start discussing the terms of transfer that protect creditors, employees, and the network itself. That is its current governance duty. Because if two decades of telecommunications history taught South Africa anything, it is that one cannot be both the network and the gatekeeper simultaneously.
