Several South African Political Parties Suing Authorities Over Energy Crisis, Reports Say

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Several South African political parties, unions and NGOs have appealed to the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria to hold an urgent hearing on relief measures taken by the country's authorities, including President Cyril Ramaphosa, amid ongoing power outages, the country's media reported on Tuesday.

The groups are seeking to get tariff hikes imposed by National Energy Regulator of South Africa (NERSA) scrapped, and several public facilities, including schools and small businesses, exempted from load shedding, according to local media.

In addition, the plaintiffs want to hold the authorities accountable and force them to disclose their plan to mitigate the ongoing energy crisis. The list of defendants includes Ramaphosa, the Eskom state energy company, as well as a number of ministers and members of the South African government.

"The government must come to court and explain why people must die in hospitals," the leader of South African independent party BOSA, Mmusi Maimane, is quoted as saying.

In mid-January, Ramaphosa's spokesperson said that the president had canceled a working visit to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos due to the energy crisis in South Africa. Local media reported that daily power outages at peak times had occurred across the country in November, December and the first half of January.

Eskom introduced energy rationing in November to reduce power consumption after seeing energy prices spike amid the West's standoff with Russia over Ukraine.