Sakeliga files NHI court application to oppose the state's delay tactics
Sakeliga’s application ensures that if legal challenges are paused, so too must the NHI’s implementation.
Sakeliga has filed a conditional counter-application to the High Court in response to the Minister of Health's bid to halt constitutional challenges to the National Health Insurance (NHI) Act. In it we appeal to the court that if legal challenges to the NHI are paused, the state's implementation of the NHI must also be paused.
The Minister is seeking to halt six constitutional challenges against the NHI Act, citing the need to conserve public resources while the procedural challenges are resolved in court proceedings.
Sakeliga’s response, filed last week, opposes this attempt to stay proceedings, but asks the court to interdict implementation of the NHI should the stay indeed be granted.
The stay application, brought by the Minister and supported by the President, would indefinitely suspend judicial scrutiny of the NHI Act, while implementation of the NHI proceeds.
This tactic amounts to an abuse of process by the state and a violation of constitutional accountability. It would shield the government’s deeply flawed NHI Act from judicial review, while inflicting ongoing harm on the public, taxpayers, healthcare services, and the economy.
Sakeliga filed its comprehensive Constitutional challenge to the NHI Act on 27 August 2025, joining several other organisations opposing the Act. Faced with widespread resistance, the government is resorting to procedural tactics such as seeking to stay proceedings to delay resolution of the constitutional objections.
Sakeliga is opposing these tactics in court, with a two-pronged approach:
- Opposing the Minister's stay application, and
- Filing a conditional counter-application for an interdict to halt implementation of the NHI should the court indeed grant a stay of the challenges.
Sakeliga's opposition and conditional counter-application rest on several grounds:
- The proposed stay undermines constitutionalism and the rule of law:
An indefinite stay based on speculative contingencies would effectively bar serious constitutional challenges, allowing the executive to proceed unchecked with implementing deeply flawed legislation, while depriving affected parties of their right to timely judicial review of state power.
- The proposed stay is prejudicial and unnecessary:
The stay hinges on resolving unrelated procedural matters raised by other applicants. Sakeliga's constitutional challenge addresses substantive flaws that stand independently of those issues.
- The government is employing delay tactics:
The Minister and President are using delay tactics to postpone judicial review while implementation proceeds. This constitutes an abuse of both executive power and court processes, enabling potentially unconstitutional conduct to continue causing harm. The stay would serve no purpose except to buy the government more time to implement and entrench an unaffordable and harmful scheme.
Conditional interdict to prevent harm
This conditional relief is necessary to avert ongoing constitutional and economic harm, and to prevent the waste of public funds on a demonstrably unaffordable scheme.
Allowing implementation to continue while legal challenges remain not only unresolved but indefinitely delayed is both unconstitutional and risks doing unnecessary damage to healthcare services that would later have to be reversed, should the constitutional challenges to the NHI ultimately prove successful. Ironically, the government's own stated concerns about conserving public resources provide support to Sakeliga’s counter-application for conditional interim relief.
The interdict application relies on the court’s power under Section 172(1)(b) of the Constitution to craft just and equitable remedies when deciding constitutional matters.
Sakeliga's broader case against the NHI Act remains one of several major challenges brought by civil society, business organisations, and healthcare stakeholders to prevent the state from implementing a reckless and irrational policy at enormous fiscal cost to taxpayers.
It is not the constitutional challenges to the NHI that should be halted, but the implementation of the NHI itself.
