Power cuts: South Africa’s state of disaster is being contested in court – COVID rulings give clues as to the outcome

Tracy-Lynn Field 

South Africa has declared a second national state of disaster in less than three years. The first was the COVID-19 disaster declaration in March 2020.

This allowed the government to pass sweeping lockdown regulations that encroached on human rights – directly and indirectly – including the rights to dignity, privacy, freedom and security of the person and the right to choose and practise a trade or occupation freely.

More recently it issued another disaster declaration in response to the country’s severe electricity supply constraints. The country is experiencing the worst power cuts on record as the national utility, Eskom, implements longer and more frequent scheduled blackouts, referred to as loadshedding. The outages are having severe social, economic and ecological effects. The declaration aims to address the effects of the power outages and to avert the possible progression to a “total blackout”.

These loadshedding regulations are not likely to encroach on human rights to