An alarming phenomenon has taken hold in Johannesburg over the past several months: Dozens of our readers have reported being extorted and intimidated by City Power and Eskom employees, contractors and subcontractors, who have turned up at their homes and cut or threatened to switch off their electricity if they don't shell out sometimes exorbitant amounts of money for power that they, as tax- and ratepayers, are already paying for. Stories from across the city and its wildly unequal socioeconomic landscape highlight how universal this problem is becoming. Daily Maverick has come up with a way for residents to push back.

Northern Suburbs

Spending a quiet afternoon enjoying her birthday last month, a resident of Parkhurst received a frantic call from her elderly mother's carer. City Power had shown up at their residence and cut off their electricity with no warning.

Four days earlier, the breaker on the pylon on her street had blown, and she had called the utility to log a fault. Her household had been running partially on solar in the meantime, and she assumed the team had arrived to fix the issue. Instead, they disconnected her entirely.

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The woman drove straight to her local City Power office, where she was told, in all seriousness, that she had neglected to inform the utility that she had been underpaying on her rates bill every month. Without producing any proof, they insisted she owed them almost R40,000 in back payments - despite running a portion of her system on solar - and that she would not get her electricity switched back on until she settled the bill.

With an at-risk parent at home, she was forced to call her bank and withdraw the large sum against her home loan.

"I didn't feel like I had any choice in the matter....