By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria has ruled that all hospitals, clinics, schools and police stations should be spared from electricity disruptions.
In a judgment delivered on Friday, the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria, ordered the Minister of Public Enterprises Pravin Gordhan to “take all reasonable steps within 60 days” to make sure there is sufficient electricity supply to the facilities.
Gordhan must also ensure that generators and other alternate energy supplies are secured to prevent power cuts.
The situation at hospitals was plainly untenable, with those who had generators having to take money from fuel out of their limited budgets for medicines and salaries, and the same applied to public schools and police stations, the judgment said.
“The police stations and schools are even worse off, they simply close or shut down during load-shedding.”
Judge Norman Davis — on behalf of a full bench said government had been warned, and had accepted, that it would run out of generating capacity in 2008. In “the 15 years since then, [it] has failed to remedy the situation.”
Davis said while government argued it had plans in place to deal with load-shedding, these were “uncertain” and would not solve “the urgent needs of the installations mentioned in [the] applicants’ application”.
The United Democratic Movement (UDM) and 18 other litigants approach the court in a bid to compel government to exempt essential services like public health institutions and schools, among others, from load shedding.
They also applied to exempt water and sanitation services, small businesses that deal in perishable goods, and cellphone networks from rolling blackouts.
The applicants, in part B, are seeking an order holding President Cyril Ramaphosa, as head of the national executive, legally responsible for the human cost of load shedding.
The case’s respondents included the Presidency, the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa), the Department of Public Enterprises (DPE), the department of Mineral Resources and Energy, (DMRE), and the Eskom management and board.
Eskom had contended that it will be technically impossible to isolate and exclude some buildings from load shedding, given how embedded they are in Eskom’s transmission and distribution networks, and that they share distribution lines with thousands of other customers.
Turning to Eskom’s submission that some public institutions were so embedded in a surrounding power network that exempting them would mean exempting a whole suburb or town, the court said the minister would then have to make another plan to keep the lights on.
“Individual solutions therefore need to be devised in instances where the DPE minister cannot secure exemptions, such as the provision of generators or alternate energy supplies.”
The judgement had also found that there had been repeated breaches by the state of its Constitutional and statutory duties and that these breaches infringe citizens’ rights to healthcare, security and education.
The bench found that there was an apprehension of irreparable harm to the right to life, among others.
Judgment was reserved on Part B of the case.
The court gave short shrift to Ramaphosa’s submission that the applicants need not have come to court, but could have, and still should, raise their concerns in parliament.