Ward 132 councillor Annette Deppe of the Democratic Alliance (DA) will be marching with the party to the Union Buildings to petition for the country to get its power back.
Deppe said the march, which will start at 10am today, 29 March, is to try and save Eskom before it collapses the country.
The party’s plan to save Eskom is:
- Reject political interference who oppose Independent Power Producers (IPPs), they must be allowed to sell power to the grid
- Stop the expenditure of expensive units at Kusile and find alternatives by introducing more IPPs in the sector
- Allow Eskom to procure coal from any source
- Review all Eskom’s diesel contracts and ensure that the cheapest diesel is sourced
- Instruct PetroSA to supply Eskom with diesel at a tax-free cost price to avoid a crisis in the short term
- Metros must be allowed to source energy from independent power producers
- Reaffirm Eskom’s engineering and maintenance employee as an ‘essential service’ so that they can not enter strike action
- Instal smart meters in major municipalities to force them to collect revenue in a timeous manner.
Eskom has struggled in the past few months to provide constant power supply in many parts of the country after it implemented Stage 4 load-shedding recently. The country experienced two weeks of continuous rotational load-shedding.
Eskom surprisingly announced on 24 March that there will be no load-shedding for the week but that the power system still remained constrained.
The planned march by the DA comes at a time with major uncertainty from the power utility as no timeframe has been given of when the problems will be resolved.
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