Cape Town – DA Parliamentary leader, Mmusi Maimane, will lead a march on the Eskom headquarters at Megawatt Park in Sunninghill on Wednesday.
Maimane’s spokesperson, Mabine Seabe, told Fin24 the DA will brief the media on how Eskom should be handling the crisis.
“The march will be a follow up on last year when we handed a memorandum to the Department of Energy,” Seabe said.
“We will be calling for Eskom to be broken up so that certain elements of the operation can be privatised,” he said.
In its media release the DA said that due to Eskom’s mismanagement, load shedding has cost the economy an estimated R300bn since 2008, and has cost the country 1 million jobs.
The party which has recently lashed out at Eskom’s handling of the crisis says the demonstration will be lead “in support of breaking Eskom’s monopoly over South Africa’s power supply”.
“The time has come to break the Eskom monopoly before it breaks South Africa,” the release said.
In her party newsletter earlier this week, DA leader Helen Zille, criticised the ANC for abandoning the Independent System Market Operator (Ismo) bill.
READ: Zille: Break Eskom monopoly or it breaks SA
The legislation would have significantly reduced Eskom’s power over the management of the national grid, and allowed for greater involvement of independent power producers (IPPs).
On Tuesday, Eskom initiated stage 1 load shedding between 17:00 and 22:00 after initially aborting an earlier notification of stage 1 shedding.
According to Eskom spokesperson, Khulu Phasiwe, electricity demand decreased significantly since the early warning notification was made in the morning.
Phasiwe praised consumers for heeding the call to reduce their electricity consumption.
ALSO READ: Eskom: Customers helped end load shedding