Photo by: Duane Daws
State-owned power provider Eskom has laid a criminal charge at the Sandton Police Station against opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA) for contravening the Regulation of Gatherings Act 205 of 1993, following an unlawful protest at its Megawatt Park head office, in Sunninghill, on Wednesday.
DA members Natasha Mazzone and Kevin Mileham arrived at Eskom’s office on Wednesday without prior approval and occupied the reception area to hand over a petition to Eskom CE Brian Molefe.
“Eskom’s mandate is powering South Africa and all its employees are committed to discharging their duties. We have not implemented load-shedding for close to five months and we continue to do maintenance on our plant to ensure long-term sustainability.
“It is, therefore, disturbing to note that a political party could act in a manner that seeks to disturb and derail the focus of a company from doing its core business by keeping it busy with nonsensical petitioning,” the power utility said in a statement on Thursday.
Eskom further highlighted that Mazzone had many opportunities to raise grievances, as the two parties had appeared in Parliament simultaneously 91 times between April 2012 and November 2015.
“Additionally, we have dealt with hundreds of parliamentary questions of which 11 dealt with the issue of remuneration in the past three years. Her disturbance yesterday was unnecessary and smacks of cheap politicking antics,” it said.
Eskom added that it would also be laying a charge of fraud as it believed that the information of some of the signatories listed on the petition was not authentic.