PSG’s Mouton wants bans on those who shun the jab
PSG CEO Piet Mouton, whose investment company has developed some of SA’s biggest corporate successes, such as Capitec, has called for the imposition of mandatory vaccinations, a step he said was necessary for the battered SA economy to open up.
In an open letter on Monday, he said people who choose not to be vaccinated should be denied entry to restaurants, public parks, shopping centres, airports, businesses and educational institutions.
While the use of vaccine passports has been controversial globally, momentum has been growing locally for its use.
SA’s economy has been among the hardest hit by Covid-19, losing more than 1-million jobs in 2020 as the country imposed lockdowns.
Experts have said a vaccination rate close to 70% of the population would allow normality to return. They also cited evidence showing that the unvaccinated are much more likely to spread the virus, get seriously ill or die, while also making it more likely that variants that may then be resistant to existing vaccines will develop.
“If you prefer lockdown and its consequences above vaccination, then the burden of lockdown should be yours, and yours alone,” said Mouton, whose PSG stable includes Curro Holdings, PSG Konsult and Stadio Holdings. It unbundled most of its Capitec stake in 2020.
On Sunday, President Cyril Ramaphosa said SA could consider vaccination passports as it seeks to more fully open the economy. Earlier in September, financial services firm Discovery said it would introduce mandatory vaccination for all staff; Sanlam followed, saying it would do the same.
RIPPLE EFFECT
Only 7.19-million people, or 18% of the adult population, are fully immunised with either Pfizer’s double-shot jab or Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot vaccine. SA’s vaccination drive got off to a slow start in February, but has since picked up pace as the government secured enough stock.
While admitting his ideas could be seen as controversial, Mouton said the country’s economy was on a precipice and lockdown restrictions needed to end.
“If a sufficient percentage of our population is not vaccinated, we will simply never return to normality again,” he said. “We have reached a point where our government should start enforcing principles like those implemented in many other countries around the world.”
He said the unvaccinated should accept lockdowns, curfews and other regulations deemed necessary to curb infections.
“The president has alluded to some form of restriction for the unvaccinated, and we support this,” Mouton wrote.
He said people with specific medical conditions who may have legitimate concerns about vaccination were too few relative to the size of SA’s population to pose a risk to society if they refused vaccination.
But those who refuse to see the ripple effect of their choice not to vaccinate should lose the right to complain about the state of the economy.
“If their business is struggling, they must accept that they have contributed to its potential demise,” he said.
The Restaurant Association of SA has, however, argued against enforcing vaccination on customers, saying this would cause further unhappiness and loss of business.
Public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane has accused President Cyril Ramaphosa of trying to intimidate and silence her in an affidavit in support of her rescission application before the Constitutional Court.
Last month, Ramaphosa urged the apex court to dismiss Mkhwebane’s rescission application. He asked the bench to refer her to the prosecuting authority for investigation over alleged perjury.
In the court papers, Ramaphosa raised Mkhwebane’s invalidated report about public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan’s approval of former tax senior Ivan Pillay’s early retirement.
On Monday, the appeals court decided Mkhwebane’s review application seeking to overturn the high court’s invalidation of that report had no prospect of success.
This latest legal defeat comes a week after Mkhwebane filed a supplementary affidavit to her founding papers before the Constitutional Court in her rescission application. The papers tackle input from Ramaphosa and parliamentary speaker Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula.
The duo are opposing Mkhwebane’s appeal to the apex court motivating for the reversal of its order on her report about Ramaphosa’s parliamentary answer to a question over the R500,000 donation from Bosasa to his CR17 campaign.
In her affidavit, Mkhwebane accuses Ramaphosa of launching a “tirade of hurling gratuitous and unsolicited insults, invective and vitriol” against her through his attorney. She maintains her errors about the Executive Ethics Code were genuine.
The public protector also says she is shocked and disappointed Ramaphosa endorsed “such a rude, disrespectful and insulting affidavit” by his attorney Peter Harris, which was filed on August 23.
Ramaphosa “tragically fails to understand” an interpretation she relied on in her predecessor’s application of the 2007 version of the code as contained in a ministerial handbook.
She argues former public protector Thuli Madonsela depended on the 2007 iteration of the code, which Madonsela cited in certain reports. The court itself relied on the same erroneous version when it decided against former president Jacob Zuma in the Nkandla case brought by the EFF, she contends. Therefore it cannot hold that she acted dishonestly in making the same mistake.
Ramaphosa, says Mkhwebane, relied on the 2007 version when he took action against former public enterprises minister Lynne Brown.
Mkhwebane says if the court were to shun her rescission bid, the consequences “could be farreaching and chaotic” as there is still confusion about which wording of the Executive Ethics Code is correct. Ramaphosa’s plea that she pay costs personally “apparently for dishonesty” is an abuse, she says.
She presses the apex court to “even save the day” by declaring all Madonsela’s reports based on the “wrong” code from 2007 null and void.
In the EFF case about statefunded upgrades to the thenpresident’s private homestead in KwaZulu-Natal, the president and the speaker, who now oppose Mkhwebane’s rescission bid, allegedly “acquiesced” in terms of the 2007 version being the code.
Ramaphosa’s allegations of “perjury” are far-fetched, she says, adding that his motivation that the apex court refer her to Shamila Batohi, the national director of public prosecutions, for investigation “[smacks] of an effort to silence me or intimidate me from doing my work without fear or favour It will never work with me.”