A flickering bulb, a makeshift wire dangling from a wall, scenes plenty of South Africans would recognise without a second thought can hide a genuinely deadly risk. Eskom used its website on 20 August 2026 to urge anyone who spots an unsafe electrical connection to report it, framing the appeal in blunt terms: these hazards can cost lives.
According to Eskom, an unsafe connection is any wiring installed without proper approval, inspection or compliance with safety standards, the kind of illegal or unauthorised hookup that bypasses the formal grid entirely, often precisely because chronic load shedding has left households and small businesses scrambling for power by whatever means available.
What Eskom is actually asking people to do
The call to action is simple: spot a suspicious wire, a makeshift tap on a pole, or a neighbour’s improvised connection, and contact Eskom’s reporting line or the local municipality. Flagging the problem early lets authorities disconnect the illegal link, repair the fault, and prevent electrocution, fire, or further damage to the national grid before any of that actually happens.
For small business owners, this carries extra weight beyond the general public-safety message. An illegal connection that fails can endanger staff directly and halt operations outright, a genuinely costly outcome at a time when many enterprises are already coping with intermittent supply on the legitimate side of the grid. Reporting a hazard, in that sense, protects both people and the bottom line at once.
Eskom’s appeal lands amid ongoing, well-documented challenges across South Africa’s electricity sector: ageing infrastructure, a persistent shortage of generation capacity, and the genuine difficulty of maintaining safety standards across a sprawling national network. The utility continues rolling out upgrades where it can, but it is explicit that community vigilance is part of the solution it is relying on, not a nice-to-have on top of its own engineering work.
Illegal connections are, in a sense, the informal economy’s own workaround for a formal supply that has not always been reliable, which is precisely why they proliferate during load-shedding stretches and why an appeal like this one keeps recurring rather than being a one-off campaign. In the meantime, Eskom’s message is unambiguous: treat any suspicious wiring as a potential emergency rather than someone else’s problem, since a single phone call genuinely can be the difference between a safe neighbourhood and a tragic, entirely preventable accident.
Illegal connections also carry a cost the average household or business rarely thinks about: every unmetered hookup draws power the utility never bills for, a loss Eskom ultimately has to recover somewhere else in its tariff structure. That makes public reporting not just a safety measure but a small, indirect way ordinary electricity users can push back against the pressures driving tariffs upward for everyone who does pay, a rare instance where an individual’s five-minute phone call plausibly connects to the much larger, slower-moving story of the utility’s finances.
South Africa’s rate of illegal electricity connections has long been linked by researchers and utilities alike to periods of sustained load shedding, since desperate, legitimate customers facing repeated outages sometimes turn to informal fixes out of frustration rather than any intent to steal power outright. That context does not make an unsafe connection less dangerous, but it does explain why Eskom frames this as a safety campaign rather than purely an anti-theft one, appealing to self-interest and community safety rather than leading with enforcement and penalties. That framing matters practically too: a household or small business more worried about being penalised than about the danger itself is less likely to actually make the call, whereas a safety-first message gives everyone, including whoever installed the connection in desperation, a reason to want it fixed rather than hidden.
