Under a dysfunctional government, every state function eventually has to be outsourced if it is to keep working. In South Africa, security, health, electricity, water, road and rail, and even criminal prosecutions have, to a significant degree, become the responsibility of private, non-traditional actors.
Now it is the turn of the opposition. Ever since former opposition stalwart John Steenhuisen threw himself so enthusiastically into his new role of being Cyril Ramaphosa’s First Concubine — enticingly voluptuous and simperingly acquiescent — it has fallen on civic-action organisations like AfriForum and Solidarity, as well as the independent business organisation Sakeliga and the family farming network SAAI, to do the political heavy lifting for the once feistily liberal DA.
Since May 2024, when the ANC-dominated Government of National Unity (GNU) snuffed out much of the DA’s oppositional fire — although a few, like Chris Hattingh in the Defence portfolio, survive uncowed for now — these predominantly Afrikaner organisations have taken up this democratically critical burden. It matters all the more because the internationally funded activist NGOs that once nipped at the heels of the apartheid regime like demented terriers, have become choristers in a radical-left choir where much of the Third Estate sings hymns of praise to Ramaphosa in falsetto. In a country where the Official Opposition is now Jacob Zuma’s MK party, it’s these systematically reviled organisations that are doing the real work of opposition.
On Monday, AfriForum won an order in the Supreme Court of Appeal that will force Eskom to hand over coal, diesel, and transport contracts. It’s a massive breach of one of the ANC state’s most extensive patronage systems and will send bolts of fear through every state-owned entity in the land. On Wednesday, AfriForum said it would privately prosecute ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula if the NPA does not reverse its refusal to charge him over the Dubai-holiday corruption scandal, and urged Washington to direct punitive action at ANC figures implicated in corruption, rather than at South Africa as a whole. Along with Solidarity and Sakeliga, it has also played a key part in the legal and political assault that put the National Health Insurance (NHI) on ice. (The DA’s Western Cape government also opposed the NHI, but through a September 2025 challenge that has yet to bear fruit.)
Sakeliga has been equally busy. In August last year, it won a Pretoria High Court ruling against race-based criteria for domestic air-service licensing. In a parallel fight over international aviation, the Minister of Transport folded quickly, and last month the government’s International Air Services Council followed suit, surrendering before the case was even heard. It’s an important victory with implications beyond the aviation sector, in that it limits the scope of the GNU to apply race regulations to foreign actors. Sakeliga also helped force national intervention in the wrecked Ditsobotla municipality. And though Sakeliga and the employers’ organisation NEASA have just been rebuffed in their bid for urgent interim relief against race quotas, that was a defeat in speed and venue, not on the merits. The battle continues.
Now comes another major success, this time against Steenhuisen’s Department of Agriculture (DoA), whose handling of the Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) outbreak is causing severe economic dislocation across the dairy and livestock sectors, and wreaking heartbreak and financial devastation, especially among small farmers. In the Gauteng Division of the High Court in Pretoria this week, Sakeliga, SAAI, and Free State Agriculture won a significant interim victory, leaving Steenhuisen, his Director-General, and the DoA’s head of the Directorate of Animal Health, with a costs order and an immense political headache.
The key point was not that the court settled the merits of the case. It was that the litigation forced Steenhuisen and the DoA into an abrupt U-turn: a panicky, last-minute draft scheme conceding private vaccination, and a court-imposed deadline to gazette it. It was also a humiliating personal climbdown by Steenhuisen after months of hectoring opposition to farmer involvement and astonishingly personal attacks on the agricultural figures championing it. The hill Steenhuisen had been willing to die on until Tuesday was one of pure ANC statism — he claimed farmers might fashion vaccines into biological weapons — which boils down to a visceral distrust of the private sector and a compulsive clinging to total control by a failed, corruption-riddled state apparatus.
The court setback is extremely damaging to Steenhuisen. For months, farmers had argued that nothing in the law directly prohibits them from vaccinating their own animals, and demanded that he identify the legal basis for his obstruction if he believed otherwise. He wouldn’t and couldn’t. The urgent application sought, first, to stop the state from blocking the private administration of registered or authorised FMD vaccines and from interfering with lawful private import arrangements; and second, to obtain declaratory relief confirming that no such impediment existed, or alternatively, to set aside any such impediment should one be concocted.
Until the very morning of the hearing, Steenhuisen’s team was unequivocal: the government would not allow private procurement of vaccines or their administration by ordinary people. Then, at the eleventh hour, his legal team arrived clutching a supplementary affidavit and a draft scheme that contradicted that position. Suddenly, private vaccination was no longer an unthinkable heresy. Suddenly, vaccination could be done by owners under the direction of authorised veterinarians. It was not so much a retreat as a rout.
The last-minute swerve appears to have irritated Judge Cornelius van der Westhuizen. According to Sakeliga, Van der Westhuizen remarked: ‘When death knocks on the door, then presto,’ and later, ‘suddenly, when the shoe pinches, all kinds of things are done’. He also reportedly observed that, given what Steenhuisen had been saying publicly, the new draft position now ‘goes totally against his attitude.’
The DoA’s draft scheme is no Damascene conversion to liberal pragmatism. Even in retreat, the bureaucratic instinct remains alive and twitching. The draft still seeks to coordinate importation, procurement, distribution, and handling from the centre. It still comes wrapped in the dead hand of committees, enrolment requirements, application and refusal procedures, cancellation mechanisms, control periods, record-keeping obligations, identification rules, certification, tariffs, and non-compliance provisions. In other words, Steenhuisen’s concession may yet prove to be less about surrendering control than burying it in paperwork. And because the hearing resumes only on 28 April — the scheme must be gazetted by 17 April — yet more critical time will be lost in a battle against FMD that the state is already manifestly losing.
But the political carnage for the DoA, Steenhuisen, and, let’s face it, the DA, continues.
Within hours, the makeshift DoA draft had opened a fresh front, this time with the veterinarians, the very people critical to making any FMD scheme work. The Veterinary Association (SAVA) and the Ruminant Veterinary Association (RUVASA) warned that Steenhuisen’s draft scheme would make already licensed veterinarians answer not only to the statutory Veterinary Council (SAVC), but also to Red Meat Industry Services (RMIS), a private, non-statutory red-meat industry body.
The veterinarians said this would unlawfully delegate regulatory power, compromise professional integrity, create intolerable liability risks, and actively hinder the outbreak response. They demanded that all references to RMIS be expunged, and put the Minister on notice that, if the scheme were to be gazetted without its ‘fundamental illegalities’ being corrected, they would seek immediate High Court relief, including punitive costs.
Steenhuisen has contrived to turn a critically important disease-control programme into a rolling, roiling legal, bureaucratic and political fiasco, while the outbreak itself continues. But at some point, the question stops being whether Steenhuisen has mishandled the crisis and becomes whether he is not simply unsuitable for the office.
It may be time for the worst Agriculture Minister that South Africa has seen under ANC rule to resign of his own accord, be fired by Ramaphosa, or be ‘redeployed’, in good old ANC fashion, by the DA.
It may be time to outsource John Steenhuisen.
