Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen has reached the defining moment of his political career. As this newspaper reported over the weekend, foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is no longer a farming issue. It stands as a national security risk to the political and economic stability of the country.

For Steenhuisen, the stakes must seem even greater. Sharks are circling everywhere. Dirt-digging and leaks are all about and the legacy media delights in every salacious detail. Donors, often deeply ignorant of strategy, are turning.

In many respects that is unfair. Under Steenhuisen’s leadership the African National Congress (ANC) lost its majority; he was central to securing the unity government that saved South Africa from catastrophe; the Democratic Alliance (DA), the party which he leads, is polling at the highest levels it ever has and stands to beat the ANC in every major city in municipal elections that will take place within the next year; and his party has been promisingly effective in core areas of government from reforming the Department of Home Affairs, to driving a new and better form of empowerment policy, to righting the budget, and shoring up some moral centre in South Africa’s foreign policy. The perceptions of the DA amongst black voters, long the stick used by critics to beat the party, is the best it has ever been.

But fairness does not come into it and Steenhuisen has a fair list of screw-ups to face up to.  All political careers, after all, “end in failure or disgrace”.

Whether that comes now for Steenhuisen will be determined by a disease.

FMD is wholly out of control because of the screw-ups committed by his predecessors at the ministry of agriculture. If the disease outbreak escalates further, producers will begin to default on loans, the banking system will face a crisis, thousands of agricultural workers will be jobless, food prices may leap, and retailers will turn to imports and freeze local producers out of their domestic market. Perhaps most cruelly of all, the capital base of South Africa’s rural poor, who own a third of the national cattle herd, may be devastated. The political fallout does not bear thinking about.

Much of the trouble is that the state’s central protocol for managing the disease — strict quarantines that may extend for months — may do even more damage to the economy than the virus. The cure could bring about a greater catastrophe than the disease.  The protocol was appropriate for the era when it was developed decades ago when the disease was safely hemmed into a small containment zone in the north of the country. But now that outbreaks are widespread the old protocol risks national economic and political disaster.

The central constraint that must be overcome is policy. FMD is treated as a state-controlled disease. Only the state may source and administer vaccines, and farmers or private veterinarians risk prosecution if they vaccinate independently. Yet the state has already lost control and does not have the capacity to vaccinate at scale. The vaccine requirement of 100 million doses over the next 24 months is far beyond its capacity. Its vaccine producer has collapsed into chaos and mismanagement. It ceased years ago to submit the necessary virus samples to the requisite global body. It does not have the staff.

Steenhuisen’s defining decision is whether to change the rules. The fastest route to avoiding disaster is to allow farming businesses and private veterinarians to source and administer vaccines under sensible reporting and tracking rules, while the state focuses on oversight and enforcement. If policy does not shift, and the outbreak spreads further to deliver some of the worst-case consequences that worry security thinkers, then it will almost certainly claim among its victims the chap under whose watch the DA broke the electoral dominance of the ANC and led South Africa into a new era of coalition politics – and with him whatever claim his party may still have in government that it could do a better job than the ANC.