I really do feel some pity for William Saunderson-Meyer. When the Jaundiced Eye “columnist” runs out of actual news, he desperately reaches for the petty and personal prose. “First Concubine”? “Voluptuously simpering”?
Really William, if you’re going to write erotica, at least get the genre right. This isn’t a bodice-ripper; it’s a desperate hitjob from the poison pen of the same “columnist” who is so unhealthily obsessed with me that he leaves a dripping trail of bile wherever he goes.
Let’s get one thing crystalclear: I didn’t “throw myself” into the GNU. I walked in, sleeves rolled up to fix the biosecurity catastrophe left to us after 30 years of cadre deployment, collapsed veterinary services, porous borders and zero vaccine production.
Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) didn’t start on my watch. South Africa lost its FMD-free status in 2019.
The virus has been simmering and flaring ever since.
What has started on my watch is the first serious national response in decades: a 10-year eradication road map, millions of imported doses already landing, local production restarted after two decades of neglect, a vaccine monopoly ended and full state funding for vaccinating the national herd.
No profit, no middlemen, just vaccines delivered free to farmers.
Now, the professional litigants at Sakeliga and Saai – whose business model appears to be “sue first, coordinate never” – storm into the High Court in Pretoria demanding unregulated private procurement and administration.
Not “help us speed things up”. Not “let’s partner”. Just “give us the keys and get out of the way”.
On 24 March the court listened, looked at their urgent application… and rejected it.
No urgent relief granted, not a single prayer in their papers answered. The state’s overarching authority to coordinate a notifiable disease outbreak was upheld.
The matter was postponed to 28 April so we can finalise a Section 10 scheme that has already been under development by the ministerial task team (half of whom are private veterinarians).
Costs were awarded against us – fair enough, the last-minute draft could have been tidier – but the applicants got precisely zero of what they came for.
Funny how a court telling you “No unregulated free-for-all” becomes a heroic triumph.
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The same groups who spent months demanding private action now complain that the draft scheme – which does throw open the door to private veterinarians directing vaccinations – somehow unlawfully delegates power.
Here’s the truth, they don’t want farmers to hear: uncontrolled private vaccination without traceability, without movement controls, without alignment to our international obligations, is a one-way ticket to permanent FMD endemicity and no export markets.
That is not ideology.
That is basic animal health science and trade law.
The people who actually work in this space – state and private vets, the Red Meat Industry, the Milk Producers’ Organisation – get it. The donation-hunting NGOs apparently don’t.
While they’re busy “doing the heavy lifting” in court, my department is procuring, shipping and rolling out vaccines across nine provinces. We’re working with provinces that were run into the ground over years.
And, yes, we’re doing it inside a Government of National Unity because that’s how you govern when the electorate tells you no single party has all the answers.
The DA didn’t enter government to play perpetual opposition. We entered to deliver results. If that disappoints the professional outrage industry and William Saunderson-Meyer, who has built his entire brand on permanent grievance, tough.
So, spare me the lachrymose fantasy that Saai and Sakeliga have somehow become the “real opposition”. They’re lobby groups with lawyers.
Valuable in their lane – transparency, rule of law, active civil society – but not elected, not accountable to the national interest and certainly not entitled to turn a national disease emergency into their next fund-raising campaign.
The reality is that the real fiasco isn’t my department’s handling of FMD. It’s the spectacle of organisations that claim to love farmers spending more time in court than on the ground, more time attacking the only agriculture minister in 30 years who is trying to fix the mess than helping him do it.
If they want to help, pick up the phone instead of the summons. My door has always been open. The disease doesn’t care about your press statements.
The farmers need vaccines in veins, private and public vets working together, the stakeholders partnering to win the war and movement permits that make sense.
I’ll keep delivering on these. You keep writing your myopic fan fiction. When the proactive vaccination strategy delivers its results, FMD is defeated and markets open, South Africa’s livestock industry will ultimately decide who’s been on their side.
