Andrew Morphew: Why did farmers have to sue Steenhuisen to help fight FMD?

Key topics:Court allows private FMD vaccination with lawfully sourced vaccinesState had no legal basis to ban private vaccination; policy not lawFMD response needs coordinated private-state system, not state control.By Andrew Morphew.Why did this case even exist? Why did farmers have to go to court to help fight a disease destroying their own animals?That is the question sitting behind the Gauteng High Court's 25 May 2026 ruling in Sakeliga NPC and Others v Minister of Agriculture and Others.The case existed because, for months, the state treated private vaccination, private procurement and private distribution as threats to state control. Farmers who wanted to protect their own livestock with lawfully imported vaccines were told they could not. Importers who wanted to supply vaccines were pushed aside. Private veterinarians who could have multiplied field capacity were left waiting.Then the disease moved.What the court changedThe court did not create a vaccine. It did not issue import permits. It did not lift movement controls..Read more:.FMD: A crisis defined by no vaccine - Andrew Morphew .It did something narrower, but important. It confirmed that owners and managers of cloven-hooved livestock may procure and administer lawfully imported or lawfully manufactured FMD vaccine, subject to notification, compliance and post-vaccination reporting.The relief is interim. Final declaratory proceedings must still follow within twenty days. This is not the end of the legal road.But the legal heart of the judgment is already clear:"A policy or a practice to not permit privately administered vaccinations does not qualify as a law."The state had to point to a prohibition with the force of law. It could not.The closest it came was a document the judge described as "at best a proposal to the Cabinet". It had not been published in the Government Gazette. It carried no force of law. It contained no prohibition.That single point cuts through months of official messaging. Farmers were told private vaccination was off limits. The court found that the state could not point to the law that made it so.A controlled disease does not automatically create a state monopoly over every dose of vaccine.How tightly the state clung to controlWhat makes the judgment striking is not only the legal finding. It is how hard the state fought to keep the system closed.In January, when farmers first asked for the legal basis of the prohibition, the Minister described their position as a "vaccine-free-for-all" and called it "short-sighted and reckless". The applicants described the state's position as an "egregious clinging to control".The interim order shows how weak the state's blanket-control argument had become.The state did not simply object to farmers administering vaccines. It tried to funnel the whole response, from procurement to allocation to administration to distribution, through state channels.It treated private capacity as a risk rather than a resource.It clung to control so tightly that the court order had to go beyond farm-level vaccination and direct the Minister, the Director-General and the Director of Animal Health not to interfere in commercial relations between lawful importers and international suppliers.That is an extraordinary place for a public-private partnership debate to end: with a judge telling the state not to meddle in lawful private vaccine supply.The court's view of the state's conduct was direct. It recorded that the respondents:"failed to indicate any substantive defence to the application and engineered delays in having the matter heard and adjudicated upon."Then came the conclusion:"Such conduct calls for some sanction from the court."The Minister, the Director-General and the Director of Animal Health were ordered to pay the applicants' costs, including two counsel on Scale C and the costs of the failed mediation.A postponed hearing was not vindication. It was a delayed reckoning.Brazil understood scale. South Africa confused it with control.Brazil did not control FMD by keeping farmers out. It did the opposite.It did not allow farmers to vaccinate merely because it lacked the legal power to stop them. It legally required farmers to vaccinate because it understood the arithmetic of the disease.The state could not reach enough animals, fast enough, without the producers themselves.So Brazil set the rules. Farmers bought vaccines from authorised suppliers and vaccinated on a published calendar. The government held the database, audited compliance, ran surveillance and made non-compliance commercially painful through movement and market consequences.South Africa has tried the inverse: state-centred procurement, state-centred administration, state-controlled supply, and farmers waiting for permission while the virus moves..Read more:.Sakeliga, SAAI and others issue legal demands to Minister Steenhuisen on FMD vaccination.Brazil mobilised farmers because it understood scale.South Africa blocked farmers because it confused control with capacity.No country defeats FMD by keeping the people closest to the animals outside the response.The COVID analogy showed the mistakeThat is why the Minister's COVID analogy was so revealing.He argued that farmers knowing their animals was no different from parents knowing their children during COVID. Neither, he said, could simply buy and administer vaccines, because data and surveillance had to remain under state control.Saai chairperson Theo de Jager has also said publicly that, when private procurement was raised, the Minister feared farmers would use vaccines as "biological weapons" against each other.Both arguments make the same mistake.They treat private administration as uncontrolled administration.It is not.The issue was never whether data should flow. Of course it should. The issue was whether data flow required the state to stand between farmers and lawful vaccines.The court has now exposed that distinction.The court opened participation. It did not create immunity.But this is where the judgment must not be over-celebrated.The court has corrected one part of the problem: farmers and private channels cannot simply be kept out because the state prefers to control the process. But it has not corrected the deeper policy failure.South Africa's FMD response has still been built around bureaucracy and administration, not the biology of the disease.FMD is not controlled by issuing permissions slowly, allocating vaccines unevenly and vaccinating wherever doses happen to become available. It is controlled by speed, coverage and timing. The objective is not more vaccination activity. The objective is population immunity.That requires tight vaccination windows of six to eight weeks, repeated on a six-month cycle. Vaccines must move into animals fast enough, across enough of the herd, at roughly the same time, to leave the virus with nowhere to go.A court ruling can open the channel. It cannot design the campaign.That is now the real test. Can government and industry leave the posturing behind and build a system that uses private capacity inside a coordinated national plan? Or will South Africa simply replace a state bottleneck with scattered vaccination activity?Where this leaves the countryThe judgment should not become another battlefield.It should become the point at which both sides admit the obvious.The state cannot do this alone. Farmers cannot do it alone either..Read more:.Steenhuisen has the FMD blueprint, he just refuses to follow it — Andrew Morphew .FMD will not be stopped by ideology, court orders or press statements. It will be stopped by lawful vaccine supply, private-sector execution, state audit and a coordinated strategy built around speed, coverage and timing.The court has opened the channel.The government and industry now need to turn that channel into immunity..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. 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Andrew Morphew: Why did farmers have to sue Steenhuisen to help fight FMD?

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