About the campaign
What is Operation Khanyisa?
Operation Khanyisa is a national partnership campaign that promotes the legal, safe and efficient use of electricity in South Africa. Various stakeholders, including businesses, Eskom, the government, civil society, the media and the general public have partnered in driving this important initiative.
Electricity theft is a silent crime. Many know about it but choose to ignore it. Yet, it affects all South Africans.
Electricity is stolen through illegal power connections, meter tampering and bypassing, illegal electrifications, and the sale of illegal prepaid electricity vouchers from stolen vending machines or so-called “ghost” Credit Dispensing Units (CDUs).
Contrary to popular perception, it is not only poor communities that steal electricity – it happens in upmarket residential areas, businesses, agriculture and industries, big and small, throughout South Africa. In fact, electricity stolen by the business, commerce, industry and agriculture sectors has a much bigger effect, because of the amount of power consumed by these large power users - 66% of energy losses suffered by Eskom stems from these sectors. Energy losses in the residential areas amount to 34%.
Operation Khanyisa forms part of Eskom’s Energy Losses Management Programme (ELP) that was established in 2006 to deal with energy loss. The methods used include audits, disconnections, energy balancing/accounting and loss reduction technologies.
Eskom continues with these activities but realised that, for cost effectiveness and sustainability, a different approach was needed. So they added ammunition to their arsenal and implemented a new behaviour-change approach – and began to mobilise the country through Operation Khanyisa to stand up for legal, safe and efficient power use.
