Cigarettes have one fearing democracy itself is now in lockdown

Many smokers, their fingernails chewed to the quick but who are too scared to venture out to buy illicit cigarettes, will have a feeling of “so near, yet so far” from yesterday’s legal tussle between government and some tobacco companies.

The Fair Trade Independent Tobacco Association (Fita) has won a victory in that the government has conceded that it is lawful for the organisation’s factories to make and package cigarettes – but only if these are for export.

Some smokers were dismayed at the news – not only because they would see none of the produce themselves, but also because they believe Fita’s members care more about their profits than they do about their long-suffering SA customers.

However, Fita is not letting go of its legal challenge of the government’s disaster restrictions, which continue to ban the sale of cigarettes and tobacco products.

It is by now quite obvious that the ban has done more harm than good, notwithstanding Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s claims that it is necessary on health grounds.

Those grounds are tenuous at best and wholly irrelevant at worst, given the huge explosion of cigarette smuggling which has ensued.

The government is aiming to delay the court action until next month and, presumably, use that as a reason to keep the ban in place.

It is also refusing to hand over minutes of the National Coronavirus Command Council meeting in which the ban was extended, after President Cyril Ramaphosa initially announced it would be rescinded as SA entered Level 4 of the lockdown.

The reason given for the refusal to supply the meeting’s minutes was that these were “classified”… an ominous categorising of a health debate as a national secret.

And that, more than anything else, is why we need the Fita legal action. SA’s democracy and constitution should never be placed in lockdown.

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