This article was first published by Business Day on 29 April 2025
In early April opposition legislators and business leaders rightly raised concern about the presence of a representative from a US anti-tobacco group at a Nedlac debate on the Tobacco Bill.
This incident is hardly the first time – even within the tobacco context – that SA’s political elite uncritically deferred to foreign agendas.
Indeed, March 2025 was the five-year anniversary of one of the world’s harshest pandemic lockdowns, one of the most ridiculous features of which was the near-total prohibition on tobacco sales.
The attack on the tobacco trade manifested the devastating consequences of ignoring the public, and reality, in favour of polished agendas of paternalism that transcend borders.
SA’s 2020 lockdown was a masterclass in overreach. In March that year, nominally under the Disaster Management Act, the government imposed a countrywide shutdown, banning the sale, transport and distribution of tobacco products – deemed “nonessential” – until August.
This was not a minor inconvenience: it was a five-month-long war on personal freedom and economic livelihoods. The justification hinged on vague assertions that smoking worsened Covid-19 outcomes, loosely tied to World Health Organisation (WHO) rhetoric but unsupported by compelling evidence.
The result? The illicit tobacco trade boomed, costing the fiscus billions, enriching criminals and leaving a legacy of market distortion still manifest now.
For every day of the ban tax revenue equivalent to building 1.5 community clinics was lost – a bizarre self-inflicted wound during a public health crisis.
This reckless policy did not emerge in a vacuum.
Before Covid-19, the WHO’s pandemic guidelines – rooted in the 2005 International Health Regulations – emphasised proportionate, evidence-based responses. Lockdowns were not a default. The WHO advocated voluntary measures such as hand hygiene and targeted quarantines, not mass confinement.
On smoking, the WHO did push long-term public health campaigns, but these were not premised on blunt prohibitions. Its stance was clear: interventions must reflect local realities, not one-size-fits-all edicts.
Yet – on this score and at that moment – SA ignored this counsel, opting instead to mimic China’s authoritarian lockdown model. The tobacco ban leapt far beyond WHO prescriptions, revealing a government more enamoured with Beijing’s playbook than with SA’s own constitution.
When it suits them, SA’s leaders treat international bodies and foreign governments as infallible oracles, usually at the expense of the constitution’s robust guarantees of civil liberty. Yet the same government that spurned WHO pandemic guidelines in 2020 now hides behind the organisation’s antitobacco stance to justify the heavy-handed Tobacco Bill, when it is not relying on other foreign “experts” as seen in the Nedlac controversy.
This opportunistic approach to sovereignty – ignoring the WHO when it suits, invoking it when convenient – breeds policy uncertainty and cloaks the state’s appetite for control in a veneer of respectability.
The WHO’s antismoking crusade, well-meaning as it might be, has devolved into moralising over-reach, sidelining freedom of choice under a supreme constitution. China’s lockdown model, tailored to its autocratic system, fits poorly in a democracy with a fragile economy and a restive populace – about 30% of whom smoke, many relying on the tobacco trade for survival.
Pretoria’s blind faith in these external frameworks ignored SA’s dire socioeconomic reality, punishing law-abiding citizens while black markets thrived.
The 2020 tobacco ban did not, of course, curb smoking. Smokers adapted, sourcing cigarettes illicitly at great cost to their wallets and the rule of law. Prohibition has virtually always failed, and it is failing now with tobacco. Human nature does not bend to arrogant paternalism.
The Tobacco Bill, if adopted, will be no different. Expect the legal, taxpaying tobacco market to shrink further while the number of smoking South Africans remains relatively unchanged.
The Nedlac incident underscores this ongoing vulnerability. It is not so much a problem that foreign and international entities are consulted – more information is always better than less when making decisions.
Rather, it is that the developed countries “solutions” they tend to propose are taken by our incompetent political elite and uncritically applied to a country facing many existential crises. These crises are all ultimately rooted in a policy-induced economic collapse.
The 2020 tobacco debacle and today’s deference to foreign bodies should be a wake-up call. Our so-called “leaders” have a democratic mandate to think independently, rooted in the constitution – not parrot the WHO, aping China, or bowing to American public health tyrants.
This opportunistic conceptualisation of state sovereignty not only leads to severe policy uncertainty but almost always gives a respectable façade to the state’s desire to invade its people’s liberties and harm their vital economic interests.
SA public policy must reflect SA’s reality.
