Minister of Health Zweli Mkhize. (Brenton Geach/Gallo Images via Getty Images)
- Health Minister Zweli Mkhize says they will study the High Court judgment that declared lockdown regulations under alert level 3 and 4 unconstitutional and invalid.
- He says government will look to see which regulation needs to be corrected to help with government’s aim to contain Covid-19 infections.
- Mkhize says some parts of the regulations needed to be put in context for the judge.
Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said mistakes in lockdown regulations were bound to happen because government was dealing with a new situation “that none of us really know how to go about”.
In an interview with Talk Radio 702 on Wednesday, Mkhize said in an emergency situation mistakes could have been made.
“We are going to study the judgment to see where there might have been a need for corrections to be done and how those corrections can help us to continue with the containment,” he said.
In a scathing judgment on Tuesday, Judge Norman Davis ruled that in government’s lockdown regulations there was little or no regard to the extent of the impact of individual regulations on the constitutional rights of people and whether the extent of the limitation of their rights was justifiable or not.
He declared lockdown levels 3 and 4 unconstitutional and invalid.
The application was brought by the Liberty Fighters Network (LFN) and the Hola Bon Renaissance Foundation.
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Mkhize indicated that government’s lockdown regulations – albeit with mistakes – was aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus.
“Our biggest issue is that whatever was done was done with the view to try and help contain the spread of the infection,” he said.
Mkhize said the government was guided by international best practice and advice by the scientific community but the problem lies with implementation.
“When it comes to implementation, you find there might be areas where things begin to clash, you try to align certain things. It was bound to happen that at some point we begin to get people looking at their own interest, their own constituencies therefore finding where they disagree on this and the other,” the minister said in the interview.
He said there will be areas where government gets things right and where government gets things wrong.
“We must just work together to try and correct each other as we move along,” Mkhize said.
He further noted that the most important thing is not the disagreements in government but its action.
“The key to this matter is the extent to which we can implement what will be useful in containing the spread of the infection and saving more South African lives.”
