Inside Hill-Lewis’s purge — Steenhuisen set to pay the price for rupture with farmers

DA leader Geordin Hill-Lewis kept WhatsApping his friend, Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen, about a rapid rupture between the farming community and Steenhuisen’s office, specifically his chief of staff, Jana le Roux.

She threatened a stakeholder with legal action, Rapport reported, and then dismissed farmers’ concerns in an email chain, as Daniélle Schaafsma reported here. During a foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) epidemic that has gutted a sector and remains out of control, it went down like a ton of bricks.

“There was a breakdown with the [farming] sector,” said a senior DA official, who cannot be quoted. “If the party’s taking damage, the job of the leader is to protect the party. It’s a difficult thing to do [but he had no choice].”

The young DA leader felt compelled to act. This week, he requested that President Cyril Ramaphosa reshuffle the party’s component in the Government of National Unity (GNU). The move will allow Hill-Lewis to stamp his imprimatur on the party, while demoting Steenhuisen, the DA leader whom he succeeded in April.

As Don Pinnock reported here, Fishery, Forestry and Environment Minister Willie Aucamp will replace Steenhuisen if Ramaphosa agrees. Aucamp is affable and has close relationships with the Afrikaner community. He will have to shore up a voter base that is looking elsewhere.

While the DA has historically secured the majority of white Afrikaans-speaking votes, Freedom Front Plus (FF+) spokesperson and MP Wouter Wessels noted that his party’s support base was actively expanding.

The rivalry between the two parties was highlighted by Hill-Lewis’s recent online spat with Correctional Services Minister Pieter Groenewald. Against this backdrop of heightened competition, firing Steenhuisen sends a signal to an important constituency that their concerns have been noted.

Steenhuisen lost the support of powerful AfriSol (the movement of AfriForum and Solidarity) because of the mismanagement of the FMD outbreak and the fact that the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act was passed by the GNU (with its clauses that give the head of the Education Department in a province more power over Afrikaans-medium schools).

AfriSol is non-partisan but sends powerful political signals to its members. AfriForum has 300,000 members, but if you include Solidarity and other organisations in the movement it would be more than 500,000 members.

“I communicated with him [Steenhuisen],” said AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel, adding that the DA leader kept hammering nails into his own political coffin.

“The third and final nail in the coffin was that he defended centralism [on fighting FMD]. You should say that people who can do the job must do the job,” said Kriel.

Steenhuisen should have liberalised vaccine imports to speed up mass herd sterilisation, he said.

While Steenhuisen set a one-year deadline for the vaccination of at least 80% of the 14-million-strong national livestock herd, the process was too slow to secure the herd immunity necessary for a successful campaign.

“It’s not a secret that there was friction with John,” said Kriel.

The Baby-Faced Assassin?

Steenhuisen agreed to shelve his bid to run for a second term as DA leader if he was guaranteed a Cabinet role. Hill-Lewis, who is close to the agriculture minister, always said he would not stand against his friend and agreed to challenge for DA leader only once Steenhuisen stepped aside.

Asked if this was evidence of Hill-Lewis’s other persona, the “Baby-Faced Assassin”, the DA official disagreed. “Geordin’s a very likeable person. He is calm and doesn’t get emotional. [But he] has very strong beliefs about ethics.”

He likened Hill-Lewis’s requested reshuffle to his decision to be firm on the Cape Town taxi strike, where the sector eventually stood down.

“He is also able to take decisions his constituency doesn’t like,” said the official, pointing to a steep rate hike to fund infrastructure like sewage pipes and water networks, about which Hill-Lewis is particularly passionate. (Hill-Lewis lost the additional tariff charge case against a ratepayers’ group.)

‘The best we’ve got’

Hill-Lewis is using the reshuffle to stamp his authority. The official said the party had to use its time in national government to make an impact, and it wanted to “use the best we’ve got”.

David Maynier, who could replace Aucamp at Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, has been an excellent provincial leader but has already said he is looking forward to a national role.

Alexandra Abrahams will be moved from deputy minister of Trade, Industry and Competition to Electricity, a nerve-centre role. Hill-Lewis wants to bring the hard-working Jack Bloom from provincial health watchdog politics to the deputy role at Water and Sanitation, a vital position, especially as water will be a crucial election issue.

And he plans to elevate Yusuf Cassim from Parliament into the executive — Cassim is another of the DA’s young leaders in South Africa’s second-largest party.

While there are slightly fewer than 40,000 commercial farmers in South Africa (only equal to a single parliamentary seat, assuming the majority vote DA), a significant part of the Afrikaner community is closely tied to agriculture through the value chain, universities and family networks.

Many big DA donors are also from the wealthiest part of commercial farming or closely tied to it. FMD has hurt them. While the pandemic’s long tail is decades old and tied to the state’s mismanagement of the Onderstepoort Biological Products vaccine manufacturing facility, Steenhuisen did not work tactically enough to deal with an escalating crisis, according to experts.

The sector is reeling from a 26% drop in total beef exports, a 69% cut in beef shipments to China (a market of huge potential) and R5.6-billion export revenue loss. DM