John Steenhuisen under attack

ActionSA parliamentary leader Athol Trollip said John Steenhuisen has caused a national disaster and is now under attack from his own party.

Trollip shared this information during an interview with Biznews, where he discussed the continued Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) outbreak in South Africa.

He criticised the Minister of Agriculture, John Steenhuisen, for the handling of the outbreak and the vaccination process.

Instead of letting the private sector handle vaccinations, Steenhuisen’s department is tightly controlling vaccine distribution.

He said that the DA was not a statist organisation. “It is a political party that champions smaller government and more involvement of the private sector,” he said.

“That’s why his management of this crisis has been so confounding for me and everybody else,” Trollip said.

“We have a DA minister who has doggedly stuck to a statist approach to handling the management of this foot-and-mouth disease outbreak.”

Trollip slated the national agricultural officials advising the minister, saying they speak as if they have read something out of a textbook with no direct knowledge.

“Unlike farmers, these full-time bureaucrats face zero real-world consequences. Whether an animal dies or not is neither here nor there for them,” he said.

Trollip is highly critical of the state’s and Steenhuisen’s refusal to let commercial farmers buy and administer vaccines directly.

“At one stage, he was talking about biological warfare. What a load of nonsense. This is a dead vaccine. You can’t commit biological warfare with a dead vaccine,” he said.

Despite Steenhuisen’s alleged failings in handling the outbreak, Trollip does not believe there was malicious intent.

“I don’t think it’s darker than ineptitude and bureaucratic bungling and statist ideology. I really don’t believe that it’s anything worse than that,” he said.

People from within the DA are criticising Steenhuisen’s department

On 2 June 2026, the Democratic Alliance Gauteng Legislature demanded urgent action on the Foot-and-Mouth disease threat in the province.

“FMD is not just an animal disease. It is a serious threat to farmers’ livelihoods, food security, jobs and the provincial economy,” it said.

Bronwynn Engelbrecht from the DA has tabled a motion calling for a clear public plan to vaccinate all livestock.

She also wants an audit of all municipal commonage and grazing land, stronger movement control, quarantine measures, and biosecurity.

She further asked for an intergovernmental Foot-and-Mouth disease task team with clear accountability.

“Farmers and workers are watching their animals suffer in pain, with young calves dying and dairy production collapsing,” she said.

“The DA stands with Gauteng’s farmers. We cannot allow uncontrolled movement and poor coordination to destroy the agricultural sector.”

Trollip said there is ‘nothing more ex- in politics than an ex-leader’. “Some try to cling on, and some of them want to come back,” he said.

“Steenhuisen is now coming under friendly fire from his own organisation. However, there is more and more defiance from him.”

He said that while Steenhuisen seems dismissive of farmers’ concerns, the disease is spreading and costing farms their livelihoods.

Trollip said the disease has already spread to piggeries and is set to affect sheep, goats, and game, unless it is brought under control.

“This is a travesty. We have a minister who has dug his heels in because he has listened to incompetent people in his department,” he said.

Trollip said the country can get ahead of the disease in six weeks if Steenhuisen allows the vaccines to be given to every cooperative in the country.

“They should allow the farmers to take their allocation of vaccines, account for it, and vaccinate their animals,” he said.