If Lindiwe Sisulu, recently demoted to the ministry of tourism in President Cyril Ramaphosa's reshuffle, wants to make trouble for him, I have an idea for her.
Sisulu is an ANC grandee. I don't remember her not being a cabinet minister but in her previous job of housing and water she had way too much budget and too much travel for Ramaphosa's comfort.
We hear she is going to make a run for the ANC leadership at the end of next year and that he needed to starve her of money, people and opportunity. But tourism! There is no tourism at the moment because of the pandemic and because SA is regarded by almost everyone as a very dangerous destination.
And despite much satisfied high-fiving a week or so ago when we began to threaten Ramaphosa's target of 300,000 vaccinations a day, we have since palpably lost ground. That number is no longer in prospect. Even 200,000 would raise a cheer now. We are approaching the point where the vaccination effort will fail and the problem, as with most of the ruling ANC ills, isn't corruption. It's poor policy.
By Friday we had just 3.96-million people fully vaccinated and another 3.29-million partially vaccinated (6.67% and 5.55% of the population respectively), and the rate is slowing as vaccine hesitancy begins to take hold. Sisulu's opportunity is to point out that the government's failure to vaccinate more people more quickly directly threatens the future of our third-most important foreign exchange earner (tourism, obvs, behind mining and farming).
At the current rate of vaccination we will lose another summer tourism season. Nothing can replace the hard currency tourists bring here. We don't have to lift a finger for it. It falls into our lap because this is a great place to take a break. Sisulu needs to get us off the UK's red list, fight for faster jabs and point fingers at the contented and the slow, both boxes that Ramaphosa ticks.
I like to bounce things like this off Nathan Geffen, a former Aids activist and now editor of a sparkling digital news service called GroundUp. My son is 28; why can't he get jabbed tomorrow? We have 10-million doses in the country and not enough arms to put them into.
"There's no reason to delay opening it up to ages 18-35 given so much stock and declining numbers," says Geffen.
At the current rate of vaccination we will lose another summer tourism season. Nothing can replace the hard currency tourists bring here. We don't have to lift a finger for it
"Keep priority queues for over-60 and frail people, take vaccinations to workplaces, taxi ranks, shopping centres, gyms, universities, TVETs [technical and vocational education and training colleges], Sassa [Social Security Agency] pay points. Weekend numbers are still inexplicably low.
"Change the EVDS [electronic vaccination data system] to allow people who don't have any form of ID to be registered. There's still a lack of urgency. Imagine if this was a war? Not too many wars kill 220k people in 16 months. Game is offering discounts to vaccinated people. More of that."
Yes! That 220,000 is a big number. It is the sum total of "excess deaths" in SA since the advent of Covid. Experts reckon about 90% of these would be due to Covid, nearly three times the "official" coronavirus death toll of about 75,200. I love the Game incentive and it raises an uncomfortable question. Should people be forced to vaccinate?
I sort of think they should. Before they get on a flight, for example. Or enter a government building to renew a licence. Why not? I have no time for the sanctimony of anti-vaxxers or the vaccine hesitant. Vaccines have been saving lives on Earth for all of my life.
People where I live now say local preachers are warning congregations not to vaccinate. But just because the current vaccines were developed quickly doesn't make them dangerous. It just makes us lucky. Technology in most things moves incredibly fast and, God knows, most humans eat badly.
If you laid out all 250m² of an adult intestine and then imagined, forensically, the chemistry of an average South African lunch passing over every square micrometre of it every day, a Covid vaccine would be as relatively dangerous as just one of those cigarette sweets with the red tip you could buy when I was a kid.
Not only is the government unable to find enough people to vaccinate, but it is now clear we will have a fourth wave of Covid (and probably a fifth and a sixth). It once again calls into question the management of the pandemic here.
I'd be amazed if a political challenge to Ramaphosa didn't leverage his government's ineptitude in the face of the coronavirus.
It's one thing to whinge about the rich world hoarding vaccines and quite another to be unable to use the ones you already have.
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