GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The DA would have delivered vaccines

Here’s the brutal truth: were the DA in national government, it would have already started to deliver Covid-19 vaccines. It would have planned ahead, budgeted properly, communicated effectively and been generally outcomes-orientated. In short, SA would be in a very different place.

Would there have been mistakes? Sure. Would it have dropped the ball occasionally over the past year? No doubt. But would it generally have delivered or begun to deliver vaccines? No question.

You deny that if you want, if your contempt for the DA defies history and reality itself, but it remains true nonetheless. The DA is better at service delivery than the ANC, thus it would have delivered vaccines better than the ANC.

As it so happens, however, the DA is not in national government. The majority of voters wanted the ANC to be in charge of service delivery and so, once again, they have got what they paid for: an utter shambles.

Given we are dealing with a very real life or death problem — as opposed to more abstract concerns, such as crooked tenders or SAA — that fact is worth highlighting because it is likely to resonate more than usual. But, of course, not enough to put the DA into national government.

And that’s OK. If it is pain most South Africans want, if it is catastrophe and destruction they value, they can’t argue the ANC has itself failed to deliver. It has. And, surely, that failure must be what is most desired, for the ANC’s brand over the past decade is unequivocal — it is the party of chaos. And chaos reigns.

The vitriol and rage at the ANC government’s failure is almost tangible. So hot does it burn, you can just about feel the heat coming off the page when reading columns on the vaccine debacle

It is long forgotten now, but way back in 2000 the DA set something of a precedent in this regard. As Thabo Mbeki — like Ramaphosa today, a darling of the commentariat — descended into the dark arts of beetroot and garlic, as the most effective way to treat HIV/Aids, the DA defied the national administration to provide the ARV nevirapine to all HIV-positive pregnant women at public hospitals in the Western Cape.

The DA defied national policy but the decision was the right one — the Constitutional Court would later agree after the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) took the ANC to court in 2001 — and ANC provinces such as KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng followed suit, in 2002. How could they not?

The thing is, the DA has always been guided by science and reason more than it has not. That its brave and compassionate stand on nevirapine is not intricately associated with the party to this day is an indictment of those who seek to define the DA exclusively in terms of “tone” and “style”. And, when it comes to people’s health — actual service delivery makes all that look extremely petty.

The DA, however imperfectly, values excellence and merit. This is important to understand when it comes to formal service delivery as opposed to party political rhetoric. You can make what you want of the party leadership and its behaviour, but in government it hires competent people, it has supply chains that work and it outsources delivery to people who know what they are doing.

The DA, the party, has its share of incompetents. All parties do. This is tolerable if they generally value expertise in government.

That is the crucial difference, when push comes to shove. It’s what matters now, more than ever. There would be no David Mabuza running a vaccine delivery programme under the DA. Experts would be put in charge and thus, if the DA was in national government, lives would have been saved.

It’s strange that this doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone. If our democracy is as robust as we claim, if the battle of ideas is as strong as we think, and if it is pluralism of power we seek, surely this is a point worth making? And, given the stakes, worth making with some vigour

The vitriol and rage at the ANC government’s failure is almost tangible. So hot does it burn, you can just about feel the heat coming off the page when reading columns on the vaccine debacle. But is that visceral contempt ever taken to its logical conclusion? Never. They all stop short at the entire point of it all, of democracy itself.

All we really want is to damn the ANC, using the ANC as a point of reference. So that our political universe remains insular and uniform, and we only ever really have one option. So that chaos can continue to reign, but when we have to account, we can at least say we expressed our unhappiness.

Not good enough. Moments like these are when democracy is at its most powerful, when the possibility of something better can be used as a telling influence on those who wield power. That is the point of it all.

And yet even this more selfish impulse — the simple motivation to pressure the ANC into being better in the manner that matters most — is not manifested. There are no editorials saying “Time is up: Give the DA a chance”, because our irritation with a tweet or the tone of a speech, prevents us embracing the obvious. Our greatest democratic weapon remains holstered.

We are now so invested in this game of false moral equivalence, of weighing equally the inconsequential with the substantive, that the DA’s long-standing and exceptional performance in government counts for nothing. And lives themselves can be on the table. It matters not.

This obsession with attitude is a killer. Literally.

One can concede every social media concern about the DA — it whines, it can’t read “the mood of the room”, it is too confrontational — but if you live in the real world, you would have to concede this too: it would have delivered vaccines. And if that is a choice too difficult to make, well, you are then master of your own destructive circumstance. That, too, is democracy.

But you would think the very least we could do is articulate the choice in the first instance.

LISTEN | Dr Anban Pillay answers our vaccine questions

Subscribe for free: iono.fm | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Pocket Casts | Player.fm