We are made to look like bumbling idiots fumbling around in the dark

It was one of the strangest court decisions touching education.

The North Gauteng High Court ruled that schools and other public facilities (clinics, police stations and so on) be exempted from load-shedding and that government should take “reasonable steps” and that “within 60 days” to ensure an uninterrupted supply of electricity.

You do not have to be a legal expert or an energy specialist or an education guru to know that this kind of ruling is pretty meaningless given the situation we’re in.

First, there is no capacity within the state to make this happen within even 600 days.

There are too many schools, too little electricity available, too much unresolved corruption around energy supply, and the very real threat that the system would collapse if this order came close to implementation.

Second, schools exist within well-defined areas of electricity supply; how exactly will they be isolated and exempted from what is now Stage 6 load-shedding?

Third, providing enough generators, the alternative, to all schools would require a fiscal and political commitment which simply does not exist given that we cannot even fix something that carries much less of a practical challenge and that is replacing pit latrine toilets.

Which raises the question: Why would the court make a non-implementable judgment?

After all, since 1994 we have had several bold decisions by the courts under pressure from groups like Equal Education only to find that time after time government simply ignored the order; in fact, a prominent UCT professor of law said exactly that of the load-shedding judgment–-“the order is so vague that one can simply ignore it”.

Perhaps some of us still live in this euphoria of the democratic SA where we believe the courts consist of superior minds who can dispense justice from lofty constitutional heights regardless of the political and economic reality in which we remain mired.

The idea of justice in education is something I cherish; the reality of justice delayed and denied has made a realist out of those who study education law.

Almost immediately the government indicated it would appeal the ruling and I have absolutely no doubt it will succeed.

This does not mean we should not talk about the lingering injustice that comes with the vastly differential effects of load-shedding on education.

If you are in about 20% of schools, load-shedding has no effect on teaching and learning in your institution.

Those schools have made arrangements for generators or other alternative sources of energy.

Online and hybrid learning remain undisturbed because these happen to be the schools who have parents who have generators at home or better still, gone solar a long time ago.

If, on the other hand, you are in the other 80% of schools, little or no electricity is an inescapable reality that you lived through for years, the crisis compounded by losses of learning time during the pandemic, the results of which are only now being “seen” in the disastrous results in literacy and numeracy in primary schools.

Moreover, an unreliable supply of electricity at schools is made worse by impoverished households where there is also no capacity for generating alternative energy.

Did the Pretoria High Court judge even think of these deeply embedded inequalities that remain stubbornly immune to profound judgments that in principle if nothing else upholds our rights to justice in education?

However, this sober analysis of whether the high court judgment is implementable should not mean government is off the hook.

A chastened government would have said this judgment is serious enough for us to accelerate whatever we’re doing with respect education and electricity and come up with a plan to enable these public facilities to function optimally for the sake of the people.

Unfortunately, our government is arrogant and will hide behind questions of practicability so as not to move swiftly towards any semblance of education justice.

Remember, their children and grandchildren are in those 20% of privileged schools so offspring of poor and workingclass families be damned.

Senior government officials and, dare I say, politicians from the ruling party are still trying to figure out why we needed a minister of electricity and what his role is in relation to cognate ministries.

There was no thought going into any of this by the president’s men, just the hope that we would be fooled long enough to think that this new and expensive addition to the cabinet would actually make any difference to a futile situation.

Between the ruling of the judge (no more load-shedding!) and the decision of the President (behold, a minister of electricity!), we are made to look like bumbling idiots fumbling in the dark.