The court order and accompanying cost order in the urgent legal case brought by Saai, Sakeliga and Free State Agriculture against the Minister, Director-General and Director of Animal Health of the Department of Agriculture, regarding the control of foot-and-mouth disease vaccine, have once again highlighted how far removed the bureaucratic world of the public service is from the seriousness and urgency of livestock farming. While more farms are financially collapsing every day, the Minister, after three months, brought a draft framework for action (an Article 10 vaccination scheme) to court as his solution—one that had been rejected by his own department a week earlier. The current outbreak has been a major threat since 2022/2023, yet the Minister could only present a draft minutes before the hearing.
The more than three months during which the agricultural industry tried to assist the department with the contents of the vaccination scheme have been prohibitively costly, with hundreds of dairies, stud breeders, commercial herds and small-scale farmers facing losses from which they may not recove
welcomes the fact that the court has now imposed strict deadlines on the Minister, ahead of the postponed court date. Should the Minister wish to promulgate a scheme, it must be done before 17 April 2026.
The order also creates an opportunity for farmers and other stakeholders, who have been excluded by the Minister, to provide input into the final vaccination scheme.
The matter was argued in court on Tuesday, 24 March after the Minister, for more than a month, failed to indicate the legal basis for his insistence that all aspects of the vaccination campaign must be controlled by the state. It is now clear that such legal grounds do not exist but are instead based on an ideological preference for centralised state control rather than private initiative. It is regrettable that a DA Minister subscribes to ANC ideals of central control. Farmers suspect that state interference is designed to inflate costs so that politically connected tenderpreneurs and parasitic officials can benefit improperly, regardless of the consequences for livestock farmers on their farms.
Total state control has plunged the livestock industry into its greatest existential crisis ever, and although there are some agricultural organisations that support it, Saai and its network partners are mandated to ensure that central control is not presented as the only solution.
