It was just more than four months ago that Tito Mboweni stood his ground and refused to allocate more money to the Zondo commission into state capture.
“This perpetual extension of the inquiry into state capture is not really conducive,” the minister said in February after he had unveiled his annual budget, making an unfavourable comparison to the Mpati commission into governance failures at the Public Investment Corporation.
In the end, money was found to enable the commission to work towards its next deadline, which was supposed to be the end of June. It is safe to say that Mboweni is not the only one suffering from fatigue as far as this commission is concerned. The need for another extension is hardly going to please anyone.
There has been a broader debate about the usefulness and value for money from commissions of inquiry such as the one headed by deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo, which is heading for its three-year anniversary.
There are genuine concerns about whether something that should be handled in a simple criminal probe should be subject to a multiyear commission at a cost of about R1bn. And was the soap opera about a minister’s troubled marriage really worthy of the amount of time spent on it?
In the midst of this fatigue, the idea of yet another inquiry might not sound appealing. After all, who remembers anything from previous ones on the Marikana shootings, the arms deal of the 1990s, or any one that could add to a long list. Yet there are instances in which an inquiry would be useful — not to probe things that should be taken up by prosecutors but to draw lessons for the future.
SA’s handling of the coronavirus crisis would be such a case. It would seek to establish how SA came to have one of the most severe lockdowns in the world and still emerged with one of the highest death rates anywhere in the world. It is clear that fatalities are much higher than the official number of about 60,000, based on data on excess deaths.
As the country reels from a third wave of infections and the economic hardships that will come with tighter lockdown restrictions, questions need to be asked about whether the misery and death could have been prevented. It is hard not to think back to late 2020 and early 2021, when officials were downplaying the importance of getting vaccines.
On January 3, Barry Schoub, the chair of the ministerial advisory committee on Covid-19 vaccines, wrote in the Daily Maverick bemoaning a “groundswell of impatience” as well as “demanding anger” from “vaccine activists” he accused of peddling “false hopes”. Other officials were quoted elsewhere as saying vaccines were not a “silver bullet”, which was in any case a misrepresentation of the arguments being made.
We know now that they were wrong, and the speedy rollout of vaccines has enabled countries that were able to secure them to get ahead in resuming economic activity. While SA is by no means alone in suffering a third wave, countries that have vaccinated bigger proportions of their population seem to have broken the link between infection, hospitalisation and deaths.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has become one of the world’s leading voices for a just and equitable distribution of vaccines, which he now rightly characterises as our only lasting hope for eventual victory against the virus. But how crucial were those few months when the officials were dithering? It took a public outcry and an open letter by some of the country’s top scientists before there was any discernible sign of urgency.
And there is the role of the National Treasury and whether procurement rules are fit for purpose in the middle of a national emergency. Was the problem with the rules or was it a case of officials being asleep on the job and not aware of the urgency of the situation in which SA found itself?
The Treasury’s failure to pay a deposit to secure SA’s place in the Covax initiative meant that the country, Africa’s leading economy, had to suffer the humiliation of having to rely on an NGO, the Solidarity Fund, to pay its deposit.
As it turned out the vaccines that SA secured through that programme were to be of no use after the country decided to drop the AstraZeneca vaccine based on a single study about its efficacy, though some scientists, including Shabir Madhi, who led the local trials on the vaccine, argued that this was a mistake.
In a tragic twist of fate, it turns out now that the vaccine is highly effective against the so-called Delta variant, which was first detected in India and has now become dominant in SA. At a media briefing on Saturday, the acting health minister, Mmamoloko Kubayi, was asked if SA would consider using the vaccine now. Considering the well-known challenges with securing access, she gave a wisely non-committal answer.
And what is to be said about the failures of the Gauteng provincial government leading up to the current wave?
SA would not be the only country to have an inquiry into its Covid response. Brazil is already having one and in the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is under pressure to do so immediately, though he is stalling. He is now basking in the glory of a successful vaccine programme, but the relatives of the tens of thousands who perished have not forgotten.
As a former judge quoted in The Guardian put it, such an inquiry need not be adversarial with parties “tooled up with their teams of lawyers defending their position with a view to what might happen in future with litigation”.
The aim should be to draw lessons so that we are better prepared next time, as there will surely be a next time.
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