A municipal electricity tender buys what the specification document says and nothing else. If the technical schedule asks for a breaker rated to the fault level at that point on the network, and asks for the test evidence, your product competes on merit. If it asks for a breaker, price decides and the cheapest one wins.
That distinction is now worth more than it was, because the money is starting to move. President Cyril Ramaphosa has endorsed the Phase I report of the Eskom Restructuring Task Team, a step towards an independent Transmission System Operator and a competitive market.
Reform reaches the substation or it reaches nothing
Dr Andrew Dickson, engineering executive at CBi-electric: low voltage, made the point plainly in August. Restructuring changes how electricity is traded, administered and paid for. It does not change the condition of the hardware.
"When a feeder trips or a substation fails, the cause is physical," Dickson says. "A breaker that has been in service for decades, a deteriorating cable or a connection that has degraded under repeated stresses will not be repaired by changing the structure of the electricity market."
The share at stake is the number a brand should be planning around. Redistributors, mostly municipalities, accounted for 44% of electricity sales in South Africa in 2024 on Stats SA figures cited in that piece. Not a niche channel. Close to half the meter base sits behind a buyer who runs a public tender.
The generation numbers show what maintenance buys
Eskom's own results are the argument for the spend, and they are specific. Its annual financial statements for the year to March 2025 show energy availability improving to 60.6% from 54.6%. Unplanned capacity losses fell from 32.3% to 26.1%, and loadshedding dropped from 6 367 hours to 175 hours. Eskom links that to more maintenance. Planned maintenance in the early months of the current financial year averaged 14.21% of capacity against 12.82% a year earlier.
Distribution has not had that. Dickson describes it as far more fragmented, with assets spread across Eskom, municipalities and other licensed distributors. The South African Institution of Civil Engineering's Infrastructure Report Card has recorded the disparity for years: the national transmission network is in relatively sound condition, and local distribution is the vulnerable end. Research supporting that report card went further and found no reliable national database of the condition of municipal electricity distribution infrastructure at all. Municipalities were among the asset owners least informed about their own networks.
"You cannot effectively plan the replacement of equipment if you do not have a clear picture of what you own," Dickson says.
That sentence is the commercial problem stated in engineering terms. A buyer who cannot describe the asset cannot write a condition based specification for its replacement, so the specification defaults to a generic line item and the adjudication defaults to price.
Eight percent of a falling number
There is a spending benchmark, and it has a flaw worth understanding before you build a business case around it. National Treasury's MFMA Circular 71, Financial Ratios and Norms, issued in January 2014, set an 8% norm for repairs and maintenance measured against the carrying value of property, plant and equipment. Note what that document is: a set of diagnostic ratios for reading a municipality's finances, not a rule obliging anyone to spend. Nobody is in breach at 6%.
Carrying value falls as an asset ages. Maintenance need rises as an asset ages. So the benchmark shrinks the budget for exactly the substation that needs the most work, and a municipality can sit at 8% while spending nothing where the risk actually is. Dickson notes that more recent research has questioned whether a percentage of carrying value reflects real maintenance requirements at all.
Then there is the loss that never reaches a maintenance line. ECA(SA) president Eckard van Zyl wrote in August that cable, transformer and substation theft is accelerating deterioration across Johannesburg. City Power has reported hundreds of incidents of theft and vandalism in recent months. Repair costs run into millions of rand a year that would otherwise go to upgrades. Repair teams replace stolen equipment and the same sites are hit again.
What a spec has to carry to survive
For a manufacturer or distributor selling into this market, the work is not persuasion at the end. It is getting three things into the document before it goes out.
- The duty. Fault level, operating conditions and location, not a product name. Protection equipment has to be correctly specified for the fault levels where it is installed, and a schedule that omits the duty cannot compare two bids on anything but price.
- The standard. Compliance with the applicable South African National Standards, referenced by number, so a non compliant bid is non responsive rather than merely cheaper.
- The evidence. Type test certificates and the testing regime named as a returnable. Without that line, the certificate is a claim in a brochure.
"Procurement is part of infrastructure resilience," Dickson says. "The cheapest equipment is not necessarily the lowest-cost option over its lifetime."
The gap that costs brands the most is between the specification and the installation. A correctly specified device installed badly fails like a cheap one, and the installer is the person who takes the call at two in the morning. Arabella verifies the electrical contractors who do that work and stands between the brand and the site, which is where a specification is either honoured or quietly substituted. The route in for a manufacturer is on the brands page, and the rest of this week's infrastructure reading is in insights.
On Monday
Take the last three municipal tenders you lost on price. Read the technical schedule, not the pricing schedule, and mark every line where the duty, the standard or the test evidence was missing.
Those are the lines to go and fix, and the time to do it is while a municipality is drafting its next specification rather than while it is adjudicating. A brand that helps an asset owner write a condition based schedule is doing free work that pays for itself the first time a competitor is ruled non responsive.
