Under a dysfunctional government, every state function eventually has to be outsourced if it is to keep working.
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In SA, security, health, electricity, water, road and rail, and even criminal prosecutions have become the responsibility of private actors. Now it is the turn of the opposition.
Private actors step into political vacuum
Ever since former opposition stalwart John Steenhuisen in 2024 threw himself so enthusiastically into the new role of being Cyril Ramaphosa’s First Concubine – enticingly voluptuous and simperingly acquiescent – it has fallen to Afrikaner civic-action organisations like AfriForum and Solidarity, as well as Sakeliga and the family farming network Saai, to do the political heavy lifting for the once liberal DA.
Since May 2024, when the ANC-dominated government of national unity (GNU) snuffed out much of the DA’s oppositional fire, these organisations have taken up a vital burden.
Last Monday, AfriForum won an order in the Supreme Court of Appeal that will force Eskom to hand over coal, diesel and transport contracts.
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.
With Solidarity and Sakeliga, it has also played a key part in the legal assault that put the National Health Insurance on ice.
Legal battles mount across sectors
Sakeliga has been equally busy. In August last year, it won a high court ruling against race-based criteria for domestic air-service licensing.
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 for these Afrikaner groups, this time against Steenhuisen’s department of agriculture, whose handling of the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak is causing severe economic dislocation.
In 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 department’s head of the directorate of animal health, with a costs order and an immense political headache.
The key point was that the litigation forced Steenhuisen into an abrupt U-turn.
The draft still seeks to coordinate importation, procurement, distribution, and handling from the centre.
And because the hearing resumes only on 28 April, more critical time may be lost in a battle against the disease. But the political carnage for the department, Steenhuisen, and, let’s face it, the DA, continues.
Veterinarians push back against draft scheme
Within hours, the makeshift draft had opened a fresh front, this time with the veterinarians.
Their professional organisations warned that Steenhuisen’s draft scheme would make already licensed veterinarians answer not only to the statutory Veterinary Council, but also to RMIS, a private, non-statutory red-meat industry body.
The veterinarians said this would unlawfully delegate regulatory power, compromise professional integrity and actively hinder the outbreak response.
They 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.
Calls grow for Steenhuisen to step aside
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 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” by the DA. It may be time to outsource John Steenhuisen.