This week the richest country on Earth is hosting the biennial banquet-ball of bankers, bureaucrats, and busybodies.
The Eleventh Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP11) to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) is unfolding in Geneva, with the usual band of self-styled public health experts again gathering to dictate public policy for billions worldwide.
It is a party we as ordinary people were not invited to – and never will be.
These meetings are billed as advancing global health, but we should strip the PR away and see them what they are: unaccountable international conclaves where the world’s elites, far removed from the realities of everyday life, gather. There is no seat at the table for consumer choice, no voice for personal responsibility, and certainly no appreciation that their perverse conception of “health” cannot be pursued in a vacuum.
Everyone wants healthier societies, but if we cite “health” as the sole priority – ignoring individual agency, liberty, and economic growth – totalitarianism awaits.
History is littered with examples of regimes that justified coercion “for the greater good”, only to trample human dignity in the process. True health policy must balance risks with rights and responsibility. It cannot divorce itself from consent and patient self-determination – long recognised as hallmarks of healthcare practice but seemingly no more.
No one seriously disputes that smoking is dangerous, but adults have the right to weigh those dangers themselves, without the state – and certainly not some distant global body – deploying violence (let’s call it what it is) to enforce “better” choices. This is precisely the mindset animating COP11: a paternalistic crusade that treats us as ‘little people’.
South Africa’s own delegation is in Geneva right now, no doubt nodding along to the latest demands for ever-more stringent tobacco and vaping controls, the Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Control Bill in their back pockets.
One prominent voice in these circles is Professor Lekan Ayo-Yusuf, the Director of the Africa Centre for Tobacco Industry Monitoring and Policy Research at the University of Pretoria.
I would be surprised if Prof Ayo-Yusuf was not in Geneva with the SA delegation, given his close public association with the Tobacco Bill. He has been one of the most vocal local proponents of sweeping restrictions, recently dismissing concerns about foreign influence on South Africa’s tobacco laws as “baseless” and industry-orchestrated distractions.
In a Mail & Guardian op-ed, Ayo-Yusuf insisted that the push for draconian new controls is purely domestic, aligned only with our 2005 ratification of the FCTC, and that consulting international expertise is merely good practice.
Pooh-poohs the obvious
But this pooh-poohs the obvious: what is happening is exactly the foreign dictation that critics have warned about. Nobody is saying that international expertise must be ignored outright – of course South Africa must learn from global evidence. But the backlash Ayo-Yusuf decries is entirely predictable when he and his allies, backed by powerful overseas organisations, advocate using state coercion against peaceful adults making informed lifestyle choices.
This debate must begin and end with section 12 of the South African Constitution, which guarantees everyone freedom and security of the person, including the right to “security in and control over their body”. Bodily autonomy – self-ownership – is not negotiable, but the bedrock of a free society.
When the state threatens fines and imprisonment for smoking or vaping in one’s own home – as the Tobacco Bill does – it crosses into tyranny.
Ayo-Yusuf’s work has long been intertwined with Bloomberg Philanthropies-associated entities – a gross display of paternalism dressed up as charity. Michael Bloomberg, no doubt wracked with latent guilt for his fortune and questionable past in South Africa, feels he can atone by inserting himself and his money into our affairs.
The Africa Centre that Ayo-Yusuf leads produced the 2019 and 2020 South African Tobacco Industry Interference Index, with support from Bloomberg-backed initiatives like Stopping Tobacco Organizations and Products (STOP) and Vital Strategies.
The Global Tobacco Control network, including partners like the Gates Foundation-funded indexes in later years, often collaborates with the Bloomberg-supported Global Center for Good Governance in Tobacco Control. Even the 2023 Index, funded primarily by the Gates Foundation, partnered with Bloomberg-linked organisations.
Legitimate questions
This is not a conspiracy theory. There are legitimate questions to be asked about whose agenda is really being served: American billionaire busybodies, or perfectly rational South Africans who can make choices for themselves.
International bodies like the WHO and its FCTC COP process are problematic enough on their own, routinely sidelining harm-reduction and consumer perspectives.
But when amplified by the bottomless chequebook of a single American billionaire like Bloomberg, this becomes downright insulting. Bloomberg alone has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into global anti-tobacco campaigns, often framing personal choices as public nuisances requiring heavy-handed intervention.
His “philanthropy” funds researchers and lobbyists who descend on developing states, urging governments to hike taxes, ban flavours, and regulate vaping as if it were combustible tobacco, all while ignoring evidence that such policies drive consumers to black markets and fail to reduce smoking rates.
In South Africa, where official unemployment hovers around 33%, the illicit cigarette trade already accounts for about three quarters of the market, enriched by precisely the kind of prohibitive policies that Bloomberg, Ayo-Yusuf, and South Africa’s public health establishment champion.
These foreign-funded crusades do not make us healthier. They empower criminals and undermine both economic dynamism and respect for the law. Meanwhile, safer alternatives like vaping – acknowledged by bodies like Public Health England as 95% less harmful than smoking – are demonised, denying smokers tools to quit.
Because vaping is not perfectly safe (nothing ever is), we are told, total prohibition is the best course of action. What is rarely mentioned is that countries where vaping and oral nicotine have been embraced by sensible governments saw cigarette-smoking rates plummet.
Prohibitionism fails
COP11 will doubtless produce more “recommendations” for plain packaging, outdoor smoking bans, and vaping restrictions. Evidence, however, shows prohibitionism fails.
Sweden’s embrace of SNUs has driven smoking rates below 6%; New Zealand’s regulated vaping market is slashing tobacco use. South Africa, by contrast, risks repeating the disasters of our 2020 lockdown sales ban, which birthed a gangster economy overnight.
While Ayo-Yusuf waves away foreign agenda concerns, South African policymakers are in Geneva this week absorbing the very influences he denies.
The Constitution demands that government serve the public, not coerce peaceful choices under the guise of health. It is time to reject the busybodies, both domestic and foreign, and reaffirm that South Africans are capable of governing their own bodies.
[Image: haiberliu from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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