Hundreds of opposition supporters protest power cuts in South Africa

By Hassan Isilow

JOHANNESBURG (AA) - Hundreds of supporters of South Africa’s main opposition party in Johannesburg protested the rolling power cuts across the country on Wednesday.

“Load shedding is killing jobs. Enough is enough. Power to the people,’’ read some placards carried by protesters dressed in the blue color of the Democratic Alliance (DA) party.

The protesters marched to the Luthuli House, the headquarters of the governing African National Congress party (ANC).

“This house behind us is the ground zero of the crisis in South Africa. Its ground zero for the corruption in South Africa,’’ DA leader John Steenhuisen told supporters.

He alleged that the ANC has been deploying its cadres, with some of them unqualified to powerful state positions for being party loyalists, including at the state-owned utility Eskom creating a crisis there.

“I am calling upon all South Africans to make today the beginning of peaceful rolling mass action across the country. This is the only language that these people at the ANC headquarters understand,’’ he said in a live televised broadcast.

South Africa is currently facing its worst electricity crisis in decades with rolling blackouts of up to six hours a day.

Eskom, which generates over 90% of the country's electricity, has been struggling to meet the demand and implementing different stages of outages for weeks.

Most of the output from the utility's aging power plant array is coal-fired, with the facilities in need of maintenance.

Last week, President Cyril Ramaphosa canceled his visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to deal with the crippling energy crisis in his country.

ANC spokesman Pule Mabe told reporters outside the party headquarters that the DA march to their head offices is an insult to all democratic institutions in the country because the opposition party knows where the seat of the government is or the offices of Eskom.

Mabe also said the ANC will convene an energy dialogue to address the power crisis.