South Africa is in the grip of a severe foot-and-mouth disease outbreak raging since 2019. It is a crisis and it demands an honest account of what is being done, by whom, and within what constraints.
But before I account for what my department is doing, I must address the profound irony of receiving lectures on agricultural welfare from Sam Matiase and the EFF (The Citizen, 2 April).
This is a party that has spent years cheerfully chanting “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer” at rallies, defending that hateful chant in court, while farmers buried colleagues murdered on their properties.
The same party that has fought, at every legal turn, for the right to sing about killing farmers now presents itself as the passionate defender of farming communities.
The audacity of that position deserves to be named plainly. You cannot spend a decade contributing to a climate of fear and violence in rural South Africa – one that has driven skilled, experienced farmers off the land and into early retirement or emigration – and then table a submission lamenting the state of agricultural capacity.
The connection between those two realities is not subtle.
And it does not end with the chanting. The EFF’s expropriation without compensation agenda has done severe damage to South Africa’s agricultural sector that will take years to fully measure.
When that policy was driven by the EFF into the centre of our political discourse, agricultural investment declined sharply.
Farmers – black and white, small-scale and commercial – watched the value of their land assets erode as financial institutions tightened lending against farm collateral they no longer considered secure.
Young farmers seeking to enter the sector could not access the capital they needed because banks would not lend against an asset whose constitutional protection was openly uncertain.
Established farmers deferred expansion of their operations. Some left entirely. The communal and small-scale farmers the EFF now claims to champion have suffered disproportionately from this climate of uncertainty.
They are the ones least able to absorb the contraction in agricultural credit. They are the ones who needed new investment in irrigation, storage and processing infrastructure that never came because the policy uncertainty made it unviable.
The EFF did not protect these farmers. It made their circumstances measurably harder and they did so in pursuit of a political programme that has delivered land to no-one while destroying the confidence of everyone.
This is the weakened, underinvested, fear-shadowed sector that now faces a FMD outbreak of this magnitude. A sector carrying wounds inflicted by poor policy proposals and by reckless rhetoric.
And yet the work of responding continues, because that is what governing requires.
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Let me also be precise about something that has been conspicuously misrepresented by Matiase: veterinary services are a provincial competence, enshrined in Schedule 5 of the constitution.
The state vets, the extension officers, the on-the-ground vaccination roll-out – these are delivered by provincial departments, under provincial executive authority.
At the national level, we are executing our mandate with full urgency.
We have elevated FMD to national disaster coordination status, uniting all nine provinces under a single response framework.
We have engaged the National Treasury to unlock emergency resourcing beyond what provincial budgets can absorb.
We are procuring vaccines at scale and working alongside private veterinary practitioners and industry partners to bridge the capacity gap where state services are stretched.
We are pressing every provincial MEC to deploy available resources immediately, not incrementally.
To the farmers carrying the weight of this outbreak – the national government sees your situation clearly and is working with the urgency it demands.
The inequality in access to veterinary services is not acceptable and our coordination efforts are deliberately prioritising the most vulnerable farming communities first.
We are also purposefully rebuilding South Africa’s biosecurity infrastructure and capacity in order to shield our sector against future threats.
South Africa’s agricultural sector is one of the genuine foundations of this country’s economic future.
It deserves protection, investment and honest political leadership.
It does not deserve to be used as a vehicle for opportunistic grandstanding by a party that has spent years making the lives of farmers more dangerous, more uncertain and more precarious.
We are doing the hard, unglamorous work of governing through a crisis. That work will continue long after the EFF grandstanding stops.
