Dlamini-Zuma’s cigarette ban shows crime does pay

It has been evident on occasion that the ANC either has some fairly dim people as ministers … or it takes South African citizens for fools.

A classic example was the attempted rationalisation of the spending on Jacob Zuma’s Nkandla homestead, where it was said that the property needed a large swimming pool to store water to put out fires.

The “firepool” methodology surfaced again last week, in the court case about the ban of the sales of cigarettes during the coronavirus disaster restrictions.

In responding to claims that the ban had cost the fiscus billions in lost excise revenue, Cooperative Government and Traditional Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s legal team made the extraordinary assertion that the damage to the economy from the ban would be partly offset by the stimulus from illegal cigarette sales.

Quite obviously, the legal team missed the acknowledgement that the cigarette ban – supposed to be essential to prevent loss of life from Covid-19 – had not succeeded.

Nor did they consider the government’s admission that crime does pay … or indeed that it was using the example of crime to bolster its increasingly crumbling arguments about the ban.

The idiocy in this claim is clear; but so is government’s contempt for us.

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