“Of course, I thought I had a role to play and that I added value, but the minister is entitled to decide who he wants advising him,” says Wits professor Glenda Gray.
Gray, who famously clashed with health minister Zweli Mkhize in May, when she pointed out the idiocy of the lockdown rules, was this week excluded from his new ministerial advisory committee (MAC) on Covid-19.
It’s a curious move: as an acclaimed HIV/Aids scientist, she’s not only the president of the Medical Research Council (MRC), but in 2017 was also named one of Time magazine’s Top 100 most influential people.
But she’s in good company: two other outspoken scientists on Mkhize’s previous advisory committee, Prof Shabir Madhi and Prof Francois Venter, who publicly criticised the more looney-tunes lockdown rules, have also been cut from the new MAC.
But is Mkhize really entitled to do as he pleases? He is, after all, constitutionally obliged to act in the best interests of SA, taking the best decisions he can to counter Covid-19. So, if he axed the scientists for daring to speak out against the insanity of certain government decisions (think the booze ban or allowing taxis to go to 100% loading), you could argue he doesn’t really have as much carte blanche as he thinks.
Says Gray: “Maybe he’s thinking that he wants fresh thinking on the new MAC, or maybe he’s thinking that he can still call us any time, which he can. But if public trust is important, he ought to be transparent about these decisions.”
And restoring public trust — shattered by obvious contradictions in the lockdown rules, and splintered by the deaths of Collins Khosa and Nathaniel Julies by the army and Bheki Cele’s gun-toting Keystone Kops — is vital right now.
On Monday, Mkhize said it would be “furthest from the truth” to suggest he disbanded the initial MAC because he didn’t want to heed the scientists’ advice.
He admitted the government didn’t follow all the scientific advice (he claims 95% of it was acted on), but added: “Those who persist [in claiming] that government has not heeded the advice of the MAC on Covid-19 are dishonest.”
But in that statement, he doesn’t explain why those troublemakers weren’t included in the new committee, saying rather that he has chosen to “augment ” the MAC to avert a second wave by bringing on experts on human behaviour.
In other words, Mkhize would have you believe it’s just a miraculous coincidence that the three most outspoken scientists happen to have been excluded from the new MAC.
If you think Mkhize wouldn’t be so prickly, consider his outrage in May, when Gray’s critique — that the government had ignored the experts, and that “e-commerce doesn’t cause Covid” — embarrassed a government constantly stumbling over its own feet. Mkhize accused her of making “false” statements, while his former director-general, Anban Pillay, asked the MRC to “investigate her conduct”.
Since then, Gray says this relationship has healed.
“I’d like to believe that excluding me from the new MAC isn’t an act of retribution. Since May, the minister and I have developed a great working relationship, and we even coauthored a scientific paper,” she says.
Excluding Madhi and Venter is equally curious.
Gray says both of them had only ever been forthright and spoke truth to power.
“If there’s any scientific expert on Covid-19 in this country, it’s Shabir Madhi. He eats, breathes and sleeps respiratory viruses, so not having him on the new MAC is sad for the country, and for Mkhize,” she says.
Since the outbreak, Madhi has spent about 90% of his time on Covid-19 — working on the vaccine trial, as well as specific outcome studies, like its impact on pregnancy.
Does Madhi believe his exclusion was retribution for being so outspoken?
“I would hope not — it would be very infantile if that were the case,” he tells the FM. “But I take the government at its word, that it believes it is at a different stage of the pandemic, and needed a different set of expertise.”
In the end, he says, he’s not disappointed to have been excluded. “In the previous MAC, outside experts were still invited in occasionally, so I still believe I can make a contribution outside of the MAC,” he says.
Venter has never minced his words about the government ’s ham-fisted response — and he isn’t about to do so now.
“Some of us became a political embarrassment for Mkhize, since we didn’t just roll over and praise the government ’s political decisions,” he tells the FM. “They expected us to say: ‘Well done on the tobacco ban, well done on the booze ban’, and instead we pointed out how these decisions didn’t stack up scientifically,” he says.
It’s no surprise Venter believes that reconstituting the MAC is simply a way to get rid of the dissidents. Most recently, they criticised the decision to keep the international travel ban in place.
As Venter puts it: “We said to them it doesn’t make sense — and transport minister Fikile Mbalula just said, we’ll do it anyway. So, the fact that we aren’t rubber-stamping their decisions is becoming awkward for them.”
Which isn’t to say those left are all yes-men — it ’s just that if Mkhize is serious about tackling any second wave, it’s odd that he would jettison rare epidemiological skills.
Ever gracious, Gray says the new MAC has “lots of expertise”, but says there are “some gaps”, particularly when it comes to epidemiologists.
Instead, Mkhize has also created a new “behavioural MAC”, whose members include leaders from the Mormon church, trade unions and the traditional healers’ association.
In his statement, Mkhize argued that the new MACs “more accurately reflect the needs of this country’s health and economic response”. Coincidentally, they also reflect the needs of an embarrassment-averse ruling party.
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