This coming Sunday, 15 March, is Consumer Rights Day. Most people today view consumer rights almost exclusively through the prism of “accurate information” and “the ability to opt-out of advertising”. But true consumer freedom is premised on choice, and its concomitant, responsibility.
Consumer freedom is under direct and constant assault around the world, no less in South Africa. The attacks, naturally, are all couched in terms of “public health”, “safety”, and the most dangerous: “but think of the children!” Most freedoms lost in the past century have in some way been premised on these empty rhetorical flourishes.
On Consumer Rights Day 2026, it is worth going over some of these threats in the particularly South African context.
Smoking and vaping
In the past year, Parliament has renewed its drive to enact the misguided Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Control Bill, which adopts a prohibitionist approach to both smoking and vaping. This includes broad powers to regulate – in fact effectively criminalise in many cases – the trade and use of electronic delivery systems (vapes), whether they contain nicotine or not.
The legislation closely follows World Health Organisation recommendations and mirrors restrictive regimes in places like Australia and New Zealand, where exorbitant excise taxes, advertising bans, and display restrictions have fuelled booming illicit markets and even organised crime violence, without meaningfully reducing smoking rates.
Vaping, in particular, is targeted despite being far less harmful than combustible tobacco. Yet the state treats adult choice as intolerable, even proposing to criminalise smoking or vaping in one’s own home or vehicle.
These proposals predictably weaponise “the youth”, who apparently enjoy vaping so much that it drives them to smoke.
The result is not public health, but black markets, lost tax revenue, and eroded respect for the rule of law.
Alcohol
Recent proposals threaten even greater restrictions on alcohol as well.
The Liquor Amendment Bill, introduced as a private member’s bill in 2025, seeks a comprehensive and total ban on alcohol advertising, promotion, and product placement across all media. It would prohibit the use of brand names or elements to encourage consumption, effectively silencing commercial expression about a legal product for adults.
Compounding this, Cyril Ramaphosa has signalled support for measures including minimum unit pricing, even higher excise duties, greater restrictions on alcohol advertising, limits on outlet density (an old National Party policy), regulated trading hours, and bans on large containers – all framed as curbing “excessive” use.
Then there is the ever-present threat of raising the legal drinking age from 18 to 21 – because the current drinking age has totally ensured total sobriety among teenagers!
These interventions undermine adult choice and responsibility while punishing responsible consumers and legitimate businesses. History shows such bans drive underground markets – and create extremely violent criminal networks – rather than solve problems, all while treating consenting adults as perpetual children in need of state protection.
Gambling
My colleague at the Free Market Foundation, Ayanda Zulu, has written extensively on government’s invigorated broadside against the gambling industry.
National Treasury’s proposed 20% national tax on online gambling operators risks disproportionately punishing licensed providers, driving players to unregulated offshore platforms, and fuelling illegal markets, much like heavy-handed restrictions elsewhere.
Zulu argues that while problematic gambling exists and warrants targeted support (such as education and voluntary self-exclusion), the state should not overreach into blanket prohibitions or punitive taxes that undermine provincial authority and economic growth. The furthest the state should go is clear, evidence-based measures focused on harm minimisation, not using gambling as a convenient villain for broader fiscal or moral agendas. Keep kids out of casinos and ensure consumers understand how the machines and algorithms and processes work before they spend their money.
True consumer freedom includes the right to risk one’s own money, without the state presuming to know better (when was the last time the South African government lived within its means?).
Digital freedom
I am a teetotaller in more ways than one. I do not smoke, vape, consume drugs or alcohol, or gamble with my money. These things matter dearly to me nonetheless, because freedom in many ways is indivisible. Yes, we do have many freedoms and lack many others, but the freedoms we do have are threatened precisely because of the precedents we set by abandoning the defence of those we lost.
And in this respect, digital freedom is notable.
While I do not smoke, vape, drink, or gamble, I am jealously protective of the autonomy and liberty of cyberspace. And it is because society long ago gave the political elite the nod to go after smokers, drinkers, and gamblers, that it feels justified today in going after basic online privacy.
All in the name of safety and the children, of course.
Digital consumers should have their privacy respected and not be forced to de-anonymise themselves to the whim of the political elite. Parents are responsible for their children. Society’s civil liberty should not suffer because parents would like a break from having to ensure Timmy and Mandy are not browsing into spaces reserved for adults.
The push around the world – and soon in South Africa, if Solly Malatsi’s threats are to be taken seriously – to adopt digital identification might seem innocuous at this moment, but when political dissidents and activists begin disappearing more reliably, society will realise that absolute “transparency” has costs.
Privacy is not a commodity to be traded for convenience, but the foundation of freedom itself. We rightly always have something to hide – and thus much to fear – from state overreach into our lives.
Bigger fish to fry
There is something particularly offensive about the fact that the only rhetorically pro-consumer party in the country, the Democratic Alliance (DA), has chosen to adopt nanny state measures in the jurisdictions it governs. Solly Malatsi, the DA Minister of Communications, and his desire to look into bringing digital ID to South Africa, is just the latest in a long line of missteps.
The DA-governed Western Cape’s anti-alcohol policies have long been notable for their harshness, with the alcohol abuse in the Cape Flats often utilised as rationalisation.
This is inexcusable. The mere fact that people inevitably use and “abuse” their freedom in ways society does not appreciate can never rightly give rise to justification for quashing that freedom.
Alcohol abuse is an actually really serious social problem and therefore requires an equally serious social solution. The communities of the Cape Flats, the churches, the youth groups, and so on, are the responsible parties, not the state.
If the Cape Flats communities however opt for inaction and acquiescence, that is all the more reason for the state to remain disengaged. This would be what the community wants, after all, and true communal desire is measured not in the rhetoric of the loud minority but the action (or inaction) of the critical mass.
Some might retort that the violent nature of the Cape Flats makes this kind of community initiative impossible. Community organisations are intimidated and attacked if they seek to disrupt the vices that have consumed their neighbourhoods.
And this is where the state does have a role to play. But anti-alcohol policy would not solve this particular problem.
All the money the Western Cape wastes on inhibiting consumer freedom should be poured into its local law enforcement institutions. If it really wanted to, it could solve the problem of gang violence in the Cape Flats in no time at all.
Say what you will about Nayib Bukele – and there is much to be said about his excesses – but he really wanted to solve El Salvador’s violent crime problem, and he made work of it. In fact, very little empty rhetoric went with it. One can take inspiration from this action bias while maintaining respect for due process.
In the Western Cape, the supply of rhetoric outstrips the supply of (inadequate though commendable) tangible action. As far as police presence is concerned, the Cape Flats needs to look like a veritable police state under martial law. No resident of the Cape Flats should be able to sneeze in their bedroom without faintly hearing “God bless you” uttered by a metropolitan officer on nightly patrol. Any insistence on keeping metro police resources in safe areas is indicative of a lack of appreciation of the crisis level of the problem.
The DA should be the party of muscular liberalism: no state interference whatsoever in your life and consumer choices, right until you decide to non-consensually harm the liberties of those around you, in which case the iron fist of the state becomes your whole world.
Liberty First
True respect for consumer choice is about putting Liberty First.
The state is failing to fulfil its most basic mandates and spends inordinate amounts of time and taxpayer money on peripheral affairs. Ensuring a healthy society that does not smoke, drink, or gamble to excess is entirely peripheral to ensuring a functional state apparatus that is able to deal with violent crime and corruption occurring at an eyewatering scale.
The Free Market Foundation’s Liberty First policy agenda is all about refocusing the state on its core directive and letting the flowers of freedom bloom.
[Image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-steel-shopping-cart-953864/]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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