Public hospitals need the government to provide them with uninterrupted power to avoid a “humanitarian disaster”, a coalition of civil society groups, political parties, and trade unions has argued in court.
Schools, police stations and small businesses should also be included in this provision, lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi told the Gauteng High Court (Pretoria). “Keep the hospitals open 24 hours a day, keep schools open 10 hours a day, keep police stations open 24 hours a day.”
Ngcukaitobi is acting for the United Democratic Movement, the Inkatha Freedom Party, the Build One South Africa, the SA Federation of Trade Unions and the National Union of Metalworkers of SA, among others, in their case against the state, with the defendants including Eskom, Minister of Public Enterprises Pravin Gordhan and President Cyril Ramaphosa.
The plaintiffs were not asking for an end to load shedding, but for “interim solutions” so that the “most critical sectors in society”, like the already over-stretched public health facilities, could be exempted from power outages.
Two options
Two options were presented to the court: the first was to compel the state to install portable generators (plus diesel) or solar panels at hospitals, schools, small businesses, and police stations, and the second was to completely exempt these places from power cuts.
Under this scenario, a hospital or school could be “isolated” by the construction of special feeder lines linked directly to substations.
While Ngcukaitobi acknowledged this would require costly upgrades to parts of the country’s electricity network, he said Eskom had exaggerated the costs.
Lawyers for Eskom and the other respondents have not yet argued their full case in court.
In its papers, the power utility argued that an immediate interdict against load shedding for thousands of facilities was “practically and legally impossible to implement”, and that it would be unable to isolate and supply electricity to particular customers without also supplying everyone else on the same distribution line.
It has also said it cannot issue instructions to municipalities about how to supply power to users. Municipalities have not been cited as respondents in the case.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Hospitals to be exempt from load shedding but it won’t happen overnight
Legal action threat as hospitals struggle with load shedding
Healthcare workers tell of the devastating toll of rolling power cuts
72 hospitals now exempted from load shedding