Plumbing the depths of political cynicism, the Democratic Alliance (DA) has launched a campaign demanding that the government do more to provide vaccines to farmers ravaged by foot and mouth disease (FMD).

Earlier this week, this newspaper reported on how the DA leader Geordin Hill-Lewis and his chief strategist Ryan Coetzee had lied about former Freedom Front Plus leader Pieter Groenewald’s role in South Africa’s parole mess in order “to take attention off the nightmare of a week experienced by their colleague, Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen, who was severely reprimanded by a court for his own scurrilous behaviour around the foot-and-mouth-disease pandemic”.

Not 48 hours later, the party has doubled down. On a party X account, the DA’s Bronwynn Engelbrecht launched a party campaign “demanding urgent action on [the] foot and mouth disease threat.”

According to the DA, “Foot and mouth disease is not just an animal disease… it is a serious threat to farmers’ livelihoods. […] Farmers and workers are watching their animals suffer in pain, with young calves dying and dairy production collapsing.”

The party goes on to demand “a clear public plan to distribute vaccines to all farmers”.

It is disgusting behaviour.

South Africa’s farmers are watching their livelihoods collapse and their animals suffer in pain because the DA’s John Steenhuisen, the agriculture minister, has fought to curb private vaccine procurement and distribution. When his department was taken to court to change that, he opposed the court action. And he keeps his job because the DA leader is protecting him and refuses to act to fire him.

Lest Hill-Lewis needs to be reminded, the Pretoria High Court found just a week ago that Steenhuisen had “engineered delays” in having his FMD policy tested in court, that in any free society “any private person may do anything that is not prohibited by law”, that “a policy or a practice to not permit privately administered vaccinations does not qualify as a law”, and that his department must henceforth “not interfere in relation to commercial relations of those who lawfully import FMD vaccines”.

It is extremely bad that the DA protects Steenhuisen at all, given the damage his mismanagement has caused to South Africa’s economy – damage the DA’s new campaign now admits to! Worse, the party continues to protect him after a court had to explain to it, a liberal democratic party, what is permissible in a free society! Then to lie about your opponent in the hope that the ensuing spat will take the focus off what the court found! And then, when that is exposed, to run the most cynical campaign calling for the government to do more to provide vaccines!

What does all this behaviour have in common? Three things. Arrogance, disdain, and dishonesty. Arrogance that how dare anyone, even a court, dictate what the party does in government. Disdain for the public and the economy who are expected to carry the costs. And a willingness to lie in the expectation that voters will be easily fooled.

The DA is confident to behave like this because it knows its voters are afraid of what might come after President Cyril Ramaphosa, and that there are therefore bigger issues at stake, and that those voters have no choice but to vote for the DA. For a time that will probably hold true and DA support will hold up. But the African National Congress (ANC) old guard say there was a time, as they were coming to power, that many in their party thought in the same way. And that they convinced themselves that because there were bigger issues at stake, and that the voting public had nowhere else to go, the first slips of ethics could be excused and overlooked even as these morphed into a disdain for the public interest and later the interests of the ANC’s most loyal supporters too.

Now what so many good people in that party had worked for, the most important of which was to bring dignity, to black and white alike, lies in ruins.