A second DA billboard has been vandalised in Johannesburg, just hours after being erected.

The billboard said: “The ANC has killed the lights affecting 57 million South Africans!”

DA chief whip John Steenhuisen unveiled the billboard on Sunday on the Queen Elizabeth Bridge in downtown Johannesburg, hot on the heels of a week of load-shedding by Eskom, taking aim at the ruling party’s mismanagement of the electricity utility.

But by Monday morning it had been largely destroyed.

Steenhuisen tweeted on Monday: “Can’t keep the lights burning so burn billboards instead? Obviously the truth hurts, the billboard will be up again shortly to keep reminding our citizens that we don’t have an Eskom problem, we have an ANC problem!”

Steenhuisen said on Sunday that the ANC had left Eskom besieged with “corruption, inefficiency, mismanagement and debt”.

“The previous management teams at Eskom have plundered the crippled state-owned entity through pre-paid coal contracts, nepotism, inflated supply contracts and exorbitant consultancy fees with the likes of Mckinsey, Trillian and Tegeta. Furthermore, Eskom executives have consistently rewarded themselves with massive bonuses and salaries. These actions have hollowed out the entity and left it in financial ruin.”

Steenhuisen believed President Cyril Ramaphosa’s proposal to unbundle Eskom into a holding company, with three separate business entities to be owned entirely by the holding company, would fail because each of the three entities would have the same holding board.