“MBABANE, 21 June (IRIN) – The escalating incidence of copper wire theft has set back efforts to electrify Swaziland’s impoverished urban townships and isolated pockets of the countryside.

‘Copper wire is used to ground the transformers as protection against lightning strikes: the energy from lightning is channelled away from the transformer and down the wire into the earth. When the wires are cut off by thieves, the transformers are defenceless. We have lost several of them,’ said Meshack Kunene, General Manager of Operations at the Swaziland Electricity Board (SEB).”

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