Pretoria High Court Judge President Dunstan Mlambo has indicated that the three judges hearing the case brought by the Fair Trade Independent Tobacco Association (Fita) will email the ruling to the parties on an expedited basis, according to a BusinessLive report.
The court reserved judgment yesterday without giving a date for when the ruling would be given.
This followed a day of argument by Fita’s counsel Advocate Arnold Subel SC and Marumo Moerane SC, for the state.
Moerane argued that Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, had acted legally and rationally in banning the sale of cigarettes and tobacco products, based on broad powers to safeguard South Africans’ health under the Disaster Management Act.
Fita argues that the minister overstepped her authority in declaring the ban, which had, in any case, been unsuccessful in significantly reducing the sales of cigarettes or in getting smokers to quit.
Subel argued that medical evidence did not support the state’s assertion that smoking likely led to more severe cases of Covid-19.
Instead of decreasing smoking, he said the ban – ‘sledgehammer to beat people into submission’ – would only increase mistrust between citizens and the state, according to the report on Fin24.
BusinessLive reported that while Fita contended that the cigarette ban — one of only two in the world — was irrational and must be overturned by the court, Moerane insisted that if the regulations prohibiting cigarette sales were found to be irrational, they should be referred back to Dlamini-Zuma for reconsideration.
Confirmed Covid-19 cases in South Africa rose to 55 421, and the death toll to 1 210.
It was reported that Dlamini-Zuma has filed an application for leave to appeal last week’s High Court judgment declaring various level 3 and 4 lockdown regulations unconstitutional and invalid.
Dlamini-Zuma’s lawyers argued: ‘The regulations drastically affect the lives of all South Africans on a daily basis. If they are in breach of the Constitution, that needs to be determined as a matter of high urgency.’
In the Western Cape, which has by far the highest number of Covid-19 cases and deaths, the testing backlog has dropped drastically from 28 000 last week to 3 000 this week, according to News24.
The province is limiting tests to people over 55, people with symptoms, and to healthcare workers.
The province’s head of health, Dr Keith Cloete, said last week’s backlog of about 28 000 tests had dropped to about 3 000 by Wednesday. At the peak of the backlog, they had had to wait up to two weeks for results. This week, some had received their results within 24 hours.
The scope of testing could be expanded again once the backlog has been reduced.
The RMB/BER Business Confidence Index, launched in 1975 to measure business confidence in South Africa, fell to its lowest level on record in the second quarter. The economy was under lockdown level 4 over much of the reporting period.
News24 said the previous lows were registered during the third quarter of 1985 and the fourth quarter of 1977.
The survey records the sentiments of some 1 800 executives across the building, manufacturing and domestic trade sectors.
In other virus-related news
- The Financial Times reported that the OECD predicts that rich countries face a disappointing economic recovery from the historic downturn caused by the pandemic, ‘which will leave deeper scars than any peacetime recession in the past 100 years’. The organisation said that although developed economies were likely to experience a rapid initial bounce-back from the recession, it would probably fall far short of bringing living standards back to their pre-pandemic level in early 2020; and
- The BBC reported that Brazil had restored a website listing the full data on Covid-19 in the country, just hours after it was ordered to do so by the Supreme Court. The health ministry stopped releasing cumulative totals for deaths and cases on Saturday, provoking uproar. On Tuesday, a Supreme Court judge ordered the government to release the figures amid accusations of censorship. Brazil has the world’s second-highest number of cases, and more daily deaths than any other nation.