In just two years, John Steenhuisen has gone from being an occasional thorn in the ANC’s flesh to its willing but inept stooge. This unhappy decline — damaging both to the DA and the country — has already cost him the party leadership. It should also cost him his job as the national Minister of Agriculture.
Unfortunately, it won’t. The DA is unlikely to heap further humiliation on the man who was reportedly stood down as leader in return for an assurance that he would remain deployed to the Cabinet. His successor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, is also a close personal friend.
Nor will President Cyril Ramaphosa do anything. Ramaphosa has fired only one DA-nominated member of the executive: Andrew Whitfield, the Deputy Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition. The official explanation was that Whitfield had travelled internationally without presidential approval. More plausibly, he and the DA’s national foreign-affairs spokesperson had trespassed on the ANC’s jealously guarded foreign affairs turf by meeting US congressional leaders regarding the Trump administration’s moves against South Africa.
Unlike Whitfield, Steenhuisen poses no threat to the ANC. On the contrary, he is inadvertently an asset because his bumbling weakens the DA’s claims to being far more competent than the ANC. As Ramaphosa is said to enjoy reminding his ANC comrades, quoting Napoleon Bonaparte: ‘Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.’ So, the sniggers are almost audible as the hapless former DA leader lurches from one self-orchestrated disaster to another in his cack-handed response to the foot-and-mouth Disease (FMD) tragedy.
This week, for the third time in as many months, Steenhuisen has reeled out of the Pretoria High Court with a judicially delivered bloody nose. Across the three related hearings, Judge Cornelius van der Westhuizen has been scathing about the conduct and competence of the minister and his officials. As a further rebuke, Steenhuisen, his Director-General Mooketsa Ramasodi, and Dr Mpho Maja, the head of the Directorate of Animal Health, the three state lynchpins to the anti-FMD effort, were also hit with three sequential adverse costs orders, one of them on the punitive attorney-and-client scale.
It’s all been so unnecessary. This is a fast-moving animal-health crisis that has battered red-meat export markets, disrupted local dairy and pork production, and inflicted heavy financial and emotional costs on farmers. The pain falls hardest on those least able to absorb it: smaller commercial farmers, and communal-land households dependent on modest herds of cattle and goats.
Throughout it all, Steenhuisen has behaved with the lofty arrogance and stubborn imperviousness to advice that are the defining characteristics of the failing ANC government he used to excoriate. He and his Department of Agriculture (DoA) have squandered time South Africa could ill afford, money the state does not have, and the goodwill of the farming community with which he should have been working from the start.
After three wasted months of legal flailing, ministerial bluster, and bureaucratic obstruction, this interim declaratory order gives the applicants — the independent business organisation, Sakeliga; the family-farming network, Southern African Agricultural Initiative (SAAI); and the mainstream provincial agricultural body, Free State Agriculture — substantially what they wanted.
Farmers are immediately — on the time-hallowed legal principle that what is not expressly forbidden is allowed — able to bypass the state to procure and administer lawfully imported or manufactured FMD vaccines under a coherent system of notification and reporting requirements, while the final legal determination on broader issues is pending.
This is all that farmers have ever asked for: the right to mount a flexible, ground-up private response to FMD that would not seek to usurp the cumbersome, lumbering machinery of the state, but to supplement it. This was never the anarchy of Steenhuisen’s fevered imagination. It was not, as he sneered, a demand by ‘professional litigants’ to ‘give us the keys and get out of the way’. Nor was it, as he asserted, a call for ‘uncontrolled private vaccination without traceability, without movement controls, without alignment to our international obligations’. Such claims, including the bizarre assertion that farmers must be strictly policed by his department lest they turn vaccines into a biological weapon against the South African state, now stand exposed as foolish and reckless caricatures.
VIEWPOINT- South Africa’s ongoing struggle to contain foot-and-mouth disease
Van der Westhuizen’s remarks over the three hearings catch the flavour of Steenhuisen’s and DoA’s hubris. In March, when the minister’s legal team arrived at the eleventh hour clutching a supplementary affidavit and a draft Section 10 scheme that contradicted its previous position, the judge observed: ‘Suddenly, when the shoe pinches, all kinds of things are done.’ In April, while ’reluctantly’ granting a further extension, he berated the respondents for committing to deadlines that they then ‘simply let pass’. The judge also criticised their ‘lethargic conduct’ and noted the contradiction of publicly proclaiming the FMD outbreak to be ‘of national importance and a national emergency’ but then showing by their actions that they did not treat it as such.
Now, this week, the judge took aim at the state’s ‘vehement’ and ‘adamant’ insistence that only it could attend to FMD, despite being ‘hard-pressed’ to advance any convincing legal basis for this stance. The respondents had ‘failed to indicate any substantive defence’ to the application, had ‘engineered delays’, and the hastily gazetted Section 10 scheme — at most a voluntary arrangement — ‘did not supply any substantive defence’ against the litigants’ claims. Such conduct, said van der Westhuizen, deserved sanction. But since the applicants had not specifically asked for punitive costs, the court confined itself to ordering Steenhuisen, his Director-General, and the Director of Animal Health — in other words, the taxpayer — to pay ordinary costs.
For Steenhuisen now airily to dismiss the judgment as moot because, in his words, its ‘practical effect is now largely overtaken by the gazetted Section 10 scheme’ is straight out of the ANC’s Official Ministerial Guide to Dealing with Embarrassing Setbacks. It is either not to comprehend, or else deliberately to misstate, the scale of the defeat he and the DoA have suffered. The Section 10 scheme is not an inspired piece of strategic thinking by the Minister and his minions, as he seeks to portray it. It is a cobbled-together and litigation-forced retreat.
But it’s not only the judiciary tugging at the fraying strands of Steenhuisen’s leadership. This week, Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Agriculture — which includes DA MPs — belatedly stood up on its hind legs. It raised ‘serious concerns’ about the slow pace of the department’s FMD response, warning that weaknesses in implementation, traceability, and coordination continue to undermine containment. The Department of Agriculture itself told MPs that reported outbreaks had more than doubled, from 932 in March to 2,034 by 22 May, even though more than five million vaccine doses had been secured and 3.3 million animals vaccinated.
It is clear that behind all the ministerial boasting about the number of doses procured and landed, as well as local production restarting, the rollout remains slow and inadequate. MPs pointed to shortages of ear tags, syringes, vehicles, and travel budgets, as well as limited animal-health technician capacity. They warned that vaccination alone will not contain the disease without movement controls, traceability, enforcement, and consistent biosecurity. They are demanding that provincial Agriculture MECs should be called to account, but, at least as yet, not the national Minister.
Steenhuisen’s mistakes have not only been administrative. The first was taking too long to recognise, despite repeated warnings from farmers, that FMD was out of control. Instead, as is his wont, he issued self-congratulatory social-media posts lauding himself for ‘containing’ the disease. Many of his later missteps appear to have flowed from the same two weaknesses: a credulous acceptance of official assurances — at best ill-informed, at worst designed to mislead and embarrass a DA appointee — and a juvenile eagerness to cast himself as the hero rescuing the nation.
If Steenhuisen has any sense, he’ll take the High Court ruling as a signal to abandon his habitually bellicose approach and embrace cooperation with farmers and organised agriculture, including those, like SAAI, whom he detests because they dare disagree with him. But that, of course, immediately presents him with his next dilemma: whether to backtrack on the present slow vaccine rollout, which began in February and is scheduled to be completed by December.
As Andrew Morphew of the grassroots farmer action group FMD Response SA keeps hammering publicly, an 11-month rollout is not merely slow, it’s self-defeating. South Africa needs not a leisurely bureaucratic procession but two tightly synchronised six-to-eight-week national vaccination surges, so that livestock develop broadly simultaneous immunity and transmission between herds is choked off.
Can Steenhuisen change his mind? It would take doing what he has so far found hardest: admitting that he’s wrong. It would mean admitting that the farmers and litigants he demonises are, in fact, right on the central point that the state cannot do this alone. It would mean admitting that the kind of centralised Daddy-knows-best government that he used to mock before he joined government won’t work. Most of all, it would mean admitting that he needs the speed, flexibility, and know-how that exists only in the private sector.
And if Steenhuisen were only to climb off his high horse, this farmer backing would be his for the asking.
William Saunderson-Meyer
