Why SA's Wine Industry Is Gasping For Air

Alex Dale, founder of Radford Dale winery, paints a stark picture of how the wine export ban enforced during the lockdown has negatively impacted the industry.

When Winston Churchill once said, “never let a good crisis go to waste”, he was acting against an époque-defining evil and a lethal foe (the Nazi war machine).

Cut forward to today’s evil enemy, COVID-19, and it seems that South Africa’s governing party is taking advantage of this crisis to simultaneously and overtly enforce policy conducive to the national effort, while also covertly forging a more opaque ideological agenda.

The greatest schemer of them all, Niccolò Machiavelli, would have been proud of such pernicious political machinations. Machiavelli considered political battles, not through a lens of morality, but as though they were a board game with established rules. His experience showed him that politics have always been played with deception, treachery and crime.

The overt goal in our case, at the onset of the COVID-19 crisis in South Africa, was to delay the progress of the disease and “flatten the curve”, so as to buy time to prepare our medical sector for the onslaught and the ravages of the pandemic. The clandestine goal seems to have been to dress up the measures taken in a disguise that detracted from the secondary and covertly intended result, which was to so starve targeted sectors of the economy of oxygen that they would be brought to collapse.

What better way of bringing “transformation” to a sector than by simultaneously knocking out the status quo while obliterating the value of the assets to be transformed. Collapsing the farming industry in the only province not controlled by the ANC seems like a hell of an opportunity to take out two birds with one stone. Never let a good crisis go to waste, after all.