South Africa’s Foot-And-Mouth Crisis Deepens

How Hope Turned to Doubt in South Africa’s Worst Livestock Emergency in Generations

South Africa’s foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreak has become one of the most severe in over a century. Spreading across multiple provinces since 2025, it has destroyed herds, closed auctions, imposed crippling movement bans, and pushed countless farmers toward bankruptcy. For many, the human cost has been tragic.

When DA Minister John Steenhuisen took office in the GNU, livestock farmers breathed a sigh of relief. Here, finally, was a minister from a party that promised clean governance, respect for expertise, and decisive action—unlike the failures of the past. Yet one year later, that initial optimism has given way to serious questions about priorities, delivery, and openness.

The “Breakthrough” Announcement That Doesn’t Add Up

On 6 February 2026, Minister Steenhuisen announced the release of 12,900 locally produced FMD vaccine doses from the ARC-Onderstepoort facility — the first such batch in more than 20 years. He described it as a major step forward in the “war on FMD,” with production planned to reach 20,000 doses per week from March and further scaling in the years ahead.

The numbers, however, tell a different story.

Industry and veterinary estimates indicate that controlling the disease across South Africa’s roughly 12–14 million cattle requires vaccinating a very large proportion of the national herd, in the order of 14 million doses every six months. The current output and projected ramp-up fall dramatically short of that requirement. Even in the most optimistic scenario, meaningful coverage of the national herd remains years away.

More concerning still: this is not a brand-new vaccine. Development began around 2010 with international collaboration, the formulation was fully tested, licensed and registered in 2022, and the achievement was publicly celebrated at the time — and again in 2023. Yet no large-scale production followed. The disease continued to spread while a ready, approved vaccine remained on the shelf.

Why did it take four more years — and a full year under current leadership — for even a token quantity to be produced? Was this simply inherited bureaucratic inertia and chronic underfunding of state facilities, or is there another explanation?

Why Confidentiality in a National Public Crisis?

On 10 February 2026 — only days after Dr Danie Odendaal, one of South Africa’s most experienced ruminant veterinarians and a long-serving member of ministerial FMD task teams, publicly detailed the production delays and scale shortfall — Minister Steenhuisen terminated his membership of the Ministerial Task Team on Controlled Diseases.

The stated reason: Dr Odendaal had refused to sign an impartiality and confidentiality declaration that binds members to refrain from any activity that might compromise their integrity or create a conflict, and that imposes a duty of confidentiality.

The core question is unavoidable:

In a crisis that is already extremely public — one that affects national food security, rural livelihoods, consumer prices, and export markets — why does a ministerial task team require members to sign strict confidentiality clauses at all?

Non-disclosure agreements are standard when protecting commercially sensitive intellectual property, ongoing procurement negotiations, or matters of genuine national security. But FMD control strategy, production delays on a long-licensed state-developed vaccine, and the adequacy (or inadequacy) of response plans are not trade secrets. They are matters of legitimate public interest — especially when taxpayer-funded research and infrastructure are involved and when farmers and consumers bear the consequences.

Removing the Expert Who Spoke Out

Dr Odendaal has served on FMD advisory structures since at least 2016. He has deep institutional knowledge of the disease, the Onderstepoort facility, and what realistic control looks like. In recent public statements (including social-media posts and media interviews), he described the current task team as largely ineffective, with senior officials sidelining practical input from veterinarians and farmers alike.

His removal came immediately after those criticisms became widely circulated.

Agricultural organisations, producer bodies and opposition voices have condemned the decision. Legal action is already being prepared. The optics are stark: a leading expert is sidelined not for incompetence or misconduct, but for refusing to stay silent about documented, years-long shortcomings.

Billions in Vaccine Contracts — and Zero Transparency

When domestic production capacity is so limited, South Africa will have little choice but to import millions of doses or outsource large-scale manufacture to private international laboratories. Either route involves procurement contracts potentially worth billions of rand over the coming years.

In any environment — but especially in South Africa — large, centralised, high-value tenders carry well-known risks. Against that backdrop, the combination of:

• multi-year delays on a ready-licensed vaccine,
• glowing announcements about tiny initial batches presented as major victories,
• strict confidentiality imposed on task-team members,
• and the swift removal of the one senior expert who publicly questioned the narrative

A Reckoning for Those Who Backed the DA

DA supporters backed the party because it promised a clean break from the past: no more cadre deployment, no more excuses, no more opacity, respect for expertise, and results that actually reach people on the ground.

If a DA minister:

• inherits the worst FMD outbreak in living memory,
• spends the better part of a year on roadshows and international engagements while farmers face ruin,
• celebrates token vaccine quantities as breakthroughs while the epidemiological need is orders of magnitude larger,
• and removes a respected, long-serving veterinarian for refusing to sign a secrecy declaration in the middle of a public emergency.

The questions hang in the air, unspoken but insistent:

• Why was a licensed, celebrated vaccine not moved into mass production years ago, when wider devastation could still have been prevented?
• Why impose confidentiality requirements on a task team dealing with a disease and control strategy that are already matters of intense public discussion?
• Why terminate one of the country’s foremost FMD experts precisely when he is highlighting verifiable production failures and inadequate scale?
• With billions of rands potentially flowing through future vaccine contracts, whose interests are actually being protected — those of struggling farmers, or other agendas?

South Africans — especially those who voted for change — deserve more than polished announcements, roadblocks to scrutiny, and silence from the very people appointed to solve the problem.

If this pattern continues, the cost will not only be measured in lost cattle, shuttered auctions and rising food prices. It will also be measured in the steady erosion of public trust in the very political force many hoped would govern differently.