Democratic Alliance court challenge to Eskom disaster declaration is ‘quite confusing’, says presidency
The presidency has described the decision by the Democratic Alliance (DA) to challenge the declaration of a national state of disaster over Eskom as “confusing” given that the party had been asking the president to do so since last year.
DA leader John Steenhuisen confirmed on Friday that the party had already briefed its legal team to challenge the decision, announced by president Cyril Ramaphosa in his State of the Nation address (Sona) the previous evening.
The party will also write to the supreme court of appeal (SCA) and ask for an urgent hearing for its existing challenge to section 27 of the Disaster Management Act (DMA) in order to prevent the declaration being implemented.
The disaster declaration was part of a package of measures announced by Ramaphosa in his address, in which he said he would appoint a minister in the presidency responsible for electricity to coordinate the country’s plan to fix Eskom and add new power producers to the grid.
The move has been welcomed by Business Unity South Africa (BUSA) and trade unions, which have, however, urged the government to take the necessary steps to prevent the looting of state resources, as was the case in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Steenhuisen said Ramaphosa had “desperately grasped at the straw of a sweeping national state of disaster”, the flaws of which were exposed during the Covid-19 lockdown.
“The DA is already in court to declare the Act unconstitutional and we will now do the same to prevent the ANC looting frenzy that will follow Ramaphosa’s dangerous and desperate announcement like night follows day,” Steenhuisen said.
Steenhuisen said the DA had consistently asked for “urgent and focused interventions in the energy sector”.
“A national state of disaster under the guise of dealing with the load-shedding crisis will empower the ANC to abuse procurement processes and issue nonsensical regulations that have nothing to do with the electricity crisis,” Steenhuisen said.
Presidential spokesperson Vincent Magwenya said that the DA threat was “quite confusing”.
Western Cape premier Alan WInde had written to Ramaphosa on 11 January requesting that a disaster be declared, as had Steenhuisen in a live broadcast on 23 November last year.
“Look at what they were calling for in their statement and correspondence to the president, they were pushing for the state of disaster. We find their threatened court action quite confusing,” Magwenya said.
DA MP Cilliers Brink said that in addition to challenging the declaration of the state of disaster, the party would write to the SCA asking for an urgent date to have its existing challenge to the constitutionality of section 27 of the DMA heard.
Brink said that should the application be successful, this would stop the implementation of the state of disaster “before it starts” along with Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma’s “penchant to abuse power using the Disaster Management Act”.
The party believes section 27 is unconstitutional as it deprives parliament of any oversight role in the actions taken by the executive under disaster regulations and transfers extensive legislative powers to cabinet for indefinite periods.
What constituted a national disaster was “vaguely defined”, while the same minister who declared the disaster was given power to make regulations and issue directions — and to extend the disaster indefinitely.
The section gave Dlamini Zuma powers without compelling her to provide reasons for regulations and decisions while totally bypassing parliament, with the minister becoming “a law unto herself”.
Brink said the national state of disaster was “the complete opposite” of the targeted state of disaster on Eskom and the electricity sector that the DA had been calling for.
“Ramaphosa opened up an avenue for corruption for connected cadres to loot from South African taxpayers. The DA will not stand for this,” Brink said.
