As a non-smoker, I have written about South Africa’s Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Control Bill more times than I care to count – and will continue to write about it.
Each time, the core point has been the same: this is not serious public policy. It is bureaucratic busywork dressed up as caring public health, the kind of one-size-fits-all nanny-state meddling that distracts from – and worsens – the real crises South Africa is experiencing.
MK’s turn
uMkhonto weSizwe’s (MK’s) recent turn in favour of the Tobacco Bill is noteworthy, though.
MK national spokesperson Nhlamulo Ndhlela declared that “strong tobacco control is therefore not a foreign agenda but an act of liberation”. Modern imperialism, he insists, comes not from colonial governors but from multinational tobacco corporations. Resisting the industry is “economic self-defence”. The Bill, he says, is “South African, developed through local institutions”. Anyone suggesting otherwise, that it is in fact a foreign imposition, is peddling “empty slogans”.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks!
Because if you actually read the Tobacco Bill – and compare it line by line to the World Health Organisation’s (WHO’s) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) and its session agendas – the resemblance is eerie.
Plain packaging, display bans, flavour restrictions, non-democratic on public participation, ministerial fiat to ban smoking wherever the health department considers it appropriate: these are not home-grown innovations born of some spontaneous Africanist awakening. They are textbook WHO prescriptions, imported and imposed with the quiet efficiency that only global health bureaucracies can manage.
South Africa ratified the FCTC in 2005. This Bill is the latest instalment in a very long compliance exercise.
Nobody wants this
Search high and low – as I have done, repeatedly, over the years – and you will not find a movement of ordinary South Africans demanding this kind of interference. Not in the townships, and certainly not in the rural heartlands that form the backbone of MK’s supposed constituency. Not even in the shebeens, where people actually smoke.
What you will find, if you look hard enough, is a small but loud chorus of middle- and upper-class suburbanites, cosmopolitan NGOs, and foreign-funded activists who treat tobacco control as a moral imperative. This is the same crowd that jets in from Geneva or New York on Michael Bloomberg’s dime to lecture us about “best practice”, while the rest of the country worries about violent crime, unemployment, and whether the taps will run tomorrow.
Foreign billionaires and well-heeled international NGOs have poured money into this cause for decades. The activism against tobacco is significantly more well-funded than the tobacco industry’s attempts to defend itself. For its many sins, at least the industry is upfront about its commercial interests. The anti-tobacco lobby cloaks its agenda in euphemism after euphemism when it really is just all about control.
Foreign control, which the MK now openly embraces.
And they know how it looks, hence the defensive tone of their statement – the ritualistic denunciations of “multinational corporations” and the insistence that this is somehow “pro-poor and pro-development”.
They are protesting too loudly precisely because the optics are damning: A supposedly authentic Africanist party that bangs the drum of sovereignty at every opportunity has lined up behind a piece of legislation that reads as if it were drafted in a WHO committee room by “experts” who are called various variations of “Ashley”.
Criminal syndicates
The practical consequences are as predictable as they are grim.
The Bill will not deliver meaningful public health gains. Even in the most strictly-regulated countries on Earth – Australia with its plain packaging and graphic warnings being a notable example – thriving illicit markets have simply stepped in to fill the void.
People want to smoke, and they will smoke. You can only fight this through education and involved parenting, not public policy. Regulation does not change human nature, and in this case particularly it merely shifts the profits from legal, regulated, transparent businesses to opaque criminal syndicates.
We saw exactly this in South Africa during the Covid-19 lockdown. When the government banned tobacco sales for months on end, smoking rates barely budged.
What exploded was the black market. Illicit cigarettes flooded the country, syndicates grew into the majority supplier (which persists till this day!), and the state lost billions in tax revenue while ordinary citizens effortlessly found other points of sale.
Illicit syndicates do not pay excise, they do not comply with state rules, and they certainly do not care about ministerial decrees. The more Pretoria prohibits, the more it empowers them.
The same dynamic will play out again, only this time it will be permanent. The legal industry, already representing a mere 25% of the smoking market, will shrink further. Thousands of jobs – farming, manufacturing, distribution, retail – will vanish. The economy will take yet another hit. And the public health benefit will be negligible at best.
But, hey, at least the vibes will be powerful, allowing the MK’s partners in Geneva and New York to pat themselves on the back.
Performative sovereignty
Far from the MK’s “liberation”, this is just the familiar script of the ruling elite – both local and global – imposing their moralistic preferences on a population that never asked for them.
MK has revealed itself not as the radical Africanist alternative it markets itself to be, but as just another cardboard cutout in the same mould as the African National Congress. Same priorities, same deference to international institutions, same contempt for the lived realities of the people they pretend to represent.
South Africans deserve better than this performative sovereignty. We deserve a politics that starts with the actual crises facing the country – electricity, crime, jobs, education – rather than imported moral panics about what consumers peacefully choose to inhale. The Tobacco Bill is not an act of “liberation” but another link in the chain of foreign-inspired regulation that treats ordinary citizens as children in need of supervision.
We can expect meat and all manner of other consumables to be next on the agenda. I wonder how MK will react, then?
Even if MK and government do not appreciate reality, we should. Real “sovereignty” means dealing with actual domestic problems, not academic contrivances of “problems” that only an uber-prosperous First World can dream up.
[Image: Alexandra Morozova on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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