South Africa’s second largest political party Democratic Alliance (DA) has launched a court challenge to compel the government to end the national lockdown restrictions. Through their leader John Steenhuisen, the DA has also asked the people of South Africa to donate towards the funding of the court case.
They posted the statement below:
“Today our lawyers will file papers in the High Court challenging the rationality of three separate lockdown-related issues: the night curfew, the ban on e-commerce and the restriction on exercise hours.
This is an extremely important case, because it speaks to one of the most crucial principles in our democracy, the separation of powers. We have an executive branch of government (cabinet) and a separate legislative branch (parliament) for very good reason.
The State of Disaster we are currently under, governed by the Disaster Management Act, has zero provision for oversight. The secretive NCC answers to no one.
A State of Emergency, which confers sweeping executive power and is a further step up from a State of Disaster, has parliamentary oversight. So there is no logical reason that a State of Disaster would not have this.
Because of this lack of oversight, the executive is effectively doing the job of writing our laws and regulations as they please, bypassing all the debate and possible opposition that would have happened in parliament. We have to fight this slide away from democracy.
The DA will be asking the court to apply the same oversight provisions to the State of Disaster as to the State of Emergency. Without this oversight, petty, power-drunk, would-be authoritarians have free reign to take irrational decisions that destroy lives.
We are asking South Africans to assist us in this fight to protect our democratic freedoms. We have to do this & we have to do this now. SA cannot afford another 2 weeks of hard lockdown destroying thousands of businesses & millions of jobs & lives.
We must fight back against being imprisoned by a night curfew enforced by armed soldiers and against the slew of irrational, petty regulations that do nothing but kill businesses, destroy jobs and turn decent people into criminal
We must question the constitutionality of having these decisions passed down by a secretive sub-group of the Executive with no clearly defined authority.
The past 4 weeks have already baked into our economy a depression that will take a generation to recover from. The President’s speech last night offered no evidence that he understands that this indefinite national lockdown is a tragic and costly mistake.
A surge in infections is coming, whether we lockdown or not. Instead of making the best possible use of the resources of the state to save lives, government is locking up soup kitchen workers & achar sellers.
Those with co-morbidities such as diabetes and hypertension are vulnerable and should remain locked down. Many of them cannot do so where they live, and the state can play a crucial role.
Let us put on our masks, wash our hands, keep some space around us, and then go out there and try and rescue what we can of our economy so that people can earn a living and feed their families and so that we can continue to fund and grow our healthcare system.
The threat posed by this lockdown crisis is so much greater than the threat of the virus, that we have no choice but to end the hard lockdown now and start our economy up. ”
Read: Video: John Steenhuisen embarrassed by Flo Letoaba when asked Which South Africans