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Stuff from Johannesburg

City Power Restores Supply in Pennyville

City Power has restored electricity supply in Pennyville after replacing a vandalised pole-mounted transformer on Springbok Road. Customers on this part of the network had been without supply since early September.

The transformer serving Kwagga, Zebra and Springbok Roads was vandalised on 06 September 2026. Supply remained off while a replacement unit was sourced. During that period, metering teams audited consumption to confirm who was buying electricity and who was not. Fewer than 80% of customers were vending.

This morning the Pennyville distributor was isolated. Teams removed the damaged unit, installed the replacement and completed testing before returning supply. Restoration, which had been targeted for about 16h30, has now been completed.

The switch-on carries out a commitment Charles Tlouane gave residents at the Noordgesig Electricity Imbizo on 07 October 2026, after Pennyville households asked why supply had not returned. Residents had raised the prolonged outage, together with low electricity purchases, illegal connections and the position of customers who are paying. Tlouane said customers who pay should not remain without supply because others are not vending.

Residents committed to pay for the electricity they use once supply was restored.

Metering teams are continuing audits in the area. The audits show which meters are in place and recording consumption, and which have been bypassed or are not vending. Customers who are paying have been prioritised for restoration. Connections that are unmanaged will be taken through normalisation, so that supply is lawful, metered and does not place an abnormal load on the new transformer.

Public lighting teams remain in the area, spotting and repairing faulty streetlights along Springbok Road. Lights that can be restored today are being attended to on site. Those that need parts are being logged for follow-up. The Imbizo had also highlighted the stripping of streetlight cables and the deliberate damaging of lights, which leaves roads dark and feeds illegal connections.

Pennyville falls under the Hursthill Service Delivery Centre, which supplies 46,141 customers across 11 wards. In the first quarter of 2026/27 the area recorded a 75% prepaid vending rate, with 21,820 customers buying electricity and 7,311 not vending. A sustainable supply on the new transformer depends on that gap narrowing and on the infrastructure not being vandalised again.

City Power encourages customers to report suspicious activity to Security Risk Management on 011 490 7900 or 011 490 7911, or WhatsApp 083 579 4497. Isolated faults now that supply has returned can be logged on citypower.mobi or 011 490 7484 / 0800 202 925.

“The Pennyville replacement shows what the Electricity Imbizo is meant to produce,” said Tlouane. A concern raised in Noordgesig yesterday was recorded, allocated to the Hursthill teams and carried out on Springbok Road the following day. “The engagement is not intended to end when the hall closes. It is the point at which a community complaint becomes a job on the network, with restoration, meter audits and streetlight repairs following in the same area”, Tlouane explained.

City Power will continue to use the Imbizo programme in this way, so that commitments made to residents are visible in the work done afterwards.

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Top Star Drive-In: The Cinema on the Mountain of Gold

The Ferreira Dump began growing in the late 1800s, composed of the crushed rock and chemical residue left over after early, inefficient mining processes had extracted as much gold as the technology of the time allowed. By the 1960s, it was a flat-topped, man-made mesa overlooking the city. In a stroke of entrepreneurial genius, the surface was tarred and the Top Star Drive-In was opened. It quickly became a South African institution. Its appeal was not just the movies, but the unparalleled view: as the sun set, the massive white screen would flicker to life against a backdrop of the glowing skyscrapers of the Central Business District, separated from the viewer only by the elevated M2 highway.

In the decades before television arrived in South Africa (1976), the Top Star was a primary social hub. It was a democratic space in an undemocratic time; while the city below was strictly segregated, the “car” served as a private bubble that allowed a degree of social freedom not found in traditional theaters. For many Johannesburgers, the Top Star was a site of nostalgic rites of passage—first dates, family outings where children were piled into the back of station wagons with blankets and flasks of tea, and the Saturday “car market” where the parking lot transformed into a sprawling hub for buying and selling second-hand vehicles.