Long-time livestock industry insider Willie Clack, a senior lecturer at Unisa’s School for Criminal Justice, has warned that newly appointed Minister of Agriculture Willie Aucamp is likely to face the same problems as his predecessor, John Steenhuisen, due to the nature of the bureaucracy underpinning South Africa’s animal health system.
In an article Clack published on LinkedIn on 10 July, Clack wrote: “Aucamp is likely to struggle not only because of politics, personalities, or stakeholder pressure, but because the organisational hierarchy of South Africa’s animal health system is structurally misaligned with the expectations placed on him.
“The minister is expected to fix problems for which he does not control the core implementation instruments.”
He also warned that the strong support Aucamp had received from organised agriculture could ultimately work against him by increasing pressure on him to perform “without altering the institutional realities he faces”.
Referring to the endorsements Aucamp received from AgriSA and the Southern African Agri Initiative, Clack said they were politically significant because they raised expectations that Aucamp could fix a structurally broken system.
“But the more he is presented as the minister who will restore order, the more he is exposed to failure when the legal, administrative, and provincial architecture resists rapid change,” he added.
According to Clack, the biggest obstacle Aucamp faces is the outdated legislation under which the country’s animal health governance operates: the Animal Diseases Act (No. 35 of 1984).
“Under that Act, the director of animal health [for the Department of Agriculture] is the official who must exercise the powers and perform the duties conferred by the statute, albeit with due regard to any instructions issued by the minister.
“This already places a significant distinction between political direction and statutory execution: the minister is the political head but not the direct operational controller of disease management.”
Clack pointed out that key animal health measures, including declaring controlled areas, supervising movement controls, issuing permits, managing outbreak responses, and coordinating technical enforcement, are the responsibility of the veterinary administration rather than political leadership alone.
“In practice, this means that a minister may make commitments to the public and the sector, but implementation depends on whether technical and administrative structures act quickly, lawfully and coherently,” he explained.
Clack also pointed to constraints within the country’s regulatory framework. He said provincial veterinary authorities, rather than the national Department of Agriculture, are responsible for implementing and enforcing national veterinary service standards, creating what he described as a “structural mismatch” between responsibility and authority.
He added that, at national level, several administrative layers separate the minister from the director of animal health, fragmenting accountability and slowing responses to animal health crises.
An Act fit for purpose
Clack noted that an updated Animal Health Act (No. 7 of 2002), which was intended to streamline the state’s biosecurity system, was passed by Parliament and assented to during Thoko Didiza’s first stint as agriculture minister in 2002, but it was never implemented.
“Policy documents, strategic plans, and reform discourse have, for years, assumed a more modern framework that does not legally exist in practice.
“For Aucamp, this creates a serious structural disadvantage. He is expected to manage a twenty-first-century biosecurity environment within a legal framework that the state itself has acknowledged as outdated.
“At the same time, the promised replacement [for the Act] remains dormant more than two decades after assent. The result is legal uncertainty, institutional hesitation, and a tendency for officials to talk reform without a clear, operative legal foundation,” he wrote.
Wasted efforts
Clack said the failure to implement the national Livestock Identification and Traceability System, of which he was a co-ordinator, amounted to a shocking own goal by the state. According to him, the system would have provided a comprehensive framework for disease traceability, movement control, and other measures essential for improved disease surveillance, reduced disruption during outbreaks, and the containment of foot-and-mouth disease.
“This project was fully funded but dismissed by the deputy director-general as a pilot project in May 2023,” he wrote.
He concluded: “Unless the legal framework, accountability chain, and implementation capacity of animal health governance are clarified and strengthened, any minister in [Aucamp’s] position would face much the same predicament.”
***Farmer’s Weekly asked the Department of Agriculture whether it intends to bring the Animal Health Act (No. 7 of 2002) into operation and will report on its response once received.
