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‘Ban on cigarettes is flourishing the black market’

by Salaamedia

By Zahid Jadwat

In a surprise announcement on Wednesday night, Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA), Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, said that the sale of cigarettes will remain illegal even as the country drops to Level 4 of the coronavirus lockdown.

The apparent about-turn comes not long after President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that the ban on cigarettes will be lifted as of May 1, 2020, when the country is expected to lower its coronavirus alert level.

The move to prolong the ban has been met with fuming anger not just from smokers, but from civil society organizations as well. One such organization, Tax Justice South Africa (TJSA), says that the ban has given space for a flourishing black market that undermines the lockdown. “We’ve been very vocal [about the ban on cigarettes] because we found that the illicit trade was flourishing. Even the survey released by the government last week found how easy it was to buy cigarettes,” Yusuf Abramjee, founder of TJSA, told Salaamedia on Thursday. Abramjee said that last night’s announcement “came as a shock to many”.

Speaking in Pretoria, Dlamini-Zuma said that more than 2 000 people opposed the lifting of the ban. “The government then took that into consideration and decided that we must continue as we are when it comes to cigarettes and tobacco products. The reasons are health-related.” She added: “As we know, besides the effects of tobacco on a person’s lungs, but also on the way it is shared does not allow for social distancing.” Dlamini-Zuma said smoking would encourage the spread of the novel coronavirus which has so far infected 5 350 people in South Africa and claimed 103 lives.

The correlation between smoking and Covid-19 has been a subject of international debate within the science field. A study from China prompted Public Health England and the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States to put smoking on the list of ‘risk factors’ for coronavirus earlier in the crisis. A preliminary study, however, by the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris stated that “current smoking status appears to be a protective factor against the infection by SARS-CoV-2”. The Hospital wrote that “nicotine may be suggested as a potential preventive agent against Covid-19 infection”, based on scientific literature and the hospital’s own observations.

Featured image via FreePik.

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