Admit you’re wrong, Steenhuisen

OPINION - 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 has already cost him the DA party leadership. It should also cost him his job as the minister of agriculture. Unfortunately, it won’t.

The DA is unlikely to heap further humiliation on the man who reportedly stood down as leader in return for an assurance that he would remain in the Cabinet. Nor will President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Steenhuisen is inadvertently an asset for the ANC because his bumbling weakens the DA’s claim to competence and efficiency.

Last week, for the third time in as many months, Steenhuisen has reeled out of the High Court in Pretoria 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, the minister and his top two officials were also hit with three adverse costs orders.

Throughout the foot-and-mouth (FMD) crisis, 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 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 week’s interim declaratory order gives the applicants – Sakeliga, the Southern African Agricultural Initiative and Free State Agriculture – substantially what they wanted.

Farmers are immediately able to bypass the state to procure and administer lawfully imported or manufactured FMD vaccines under a coherent system of notification and reporting requirements.

For Steenhuisen to now airily 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 the department has suffered.

The Section 10 scheme is not some brilliant 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 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 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.

Steenhuisen’s mistakes have not only been administrative. The first was taking too long to recognise that FMD was out of control. Many of his later missteps appear to have flowed from two weaknesses: a credulous acceptance of official assurances – at best ill-informed, at worst designed to mislead and embarrass a DA appointee – and an 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.

Can Steenhuisen change his mind? It would take doing what he has so far found hardest: admitting that he’s wrong.

Article: Caxton publication, The Citizen