Sneaky Dlamini-Zuma is doing SA no favours

Lockdown warden Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma is certainly correct: smoking cigarettes and tobacco products is bad for you.

Taken as prescribed, tobacco is the only product ingested by humans which will kill you or shorten your life.

However, long-standing antismoking crusader that she is, the minister has been pursuing her desire to reduce the number of smokers in South Africa with evangelical zeal. And that is not right.

It is not right because using the coronavirus crisis as a way to bring in a forced antismoking edict through the back door threatens to devalue the rest of the measures taken against the virus.

During her court battle this week with the tobacco industry, Dlamini-Zuma’s evidence – through her legal advocates – was less than convincing on medical, never mind moral, grounds.

SA has already lost hundreds of millions of rands in excise duties because of the ban on sales of smokes … money which could, and should, have been used to launch legitimate antismoking education programmes.

The ban has also bred a new culture of defying the law when it comes to tobacco – which bodes ill for such future education attempts.

Smoking is a choice. If people want to impair their health, they have the right to do so.

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