Muti goes mainstream
Triggering SA’s billion-rand herbal medicine market
Two small NGOs in medicinal herb-farming communities in rural KwaZuluNatal are first in line to benefit if a Durban entrepreneur succeeds in mainstreaming the R18bn muti market.
The farmers work near Kosi Bay and at Edakeni on the Tugela River near Eshowe. Those in Kosi Bay work with Intelezi African Herbs, a 15-year-old company that supplies African plants and botanical extracts, medicines and cosmetics. The group at Edakeni, the Muthi Futhi Trust, is run by Gill Whittington Banda, CEO of Zuplex Botanicals. Whittington-Banda’s company sources and exports indigenous plant extracts for cosmetics and health supplements.
Durban manufacturer and distributor Roger Kane-Berman says traditional remedies have attracted an “appalling press”.
“A century of Western indoctrination, including colonialism, the Witchcraft Suppression Act and the South African Medical Association banning traditional medicine in the 1950s, set things back. It all worked in favour of big pharma, which was quick to exploit traditional remedies for anything from Disprin to chemotherapy,” he says.
The Witchcraft Suppression Act is the subject of repeal in papers presented to the South African Law Reform Commission.
Kane-Berman says customers want a safe, well-presented product, and smart, clean outlets, but most traditional remedies are stored unhygienically and mixed on a concrete floor, often with dilutions too potent or too weak to be effective.
“People think they’re getting a healthy product, but they’re often not,” he says. “We’ve cleaned all that up and aim to restore the reputation and protect an ancient legacy. The Chinese, Europeans and Americans have embraced traditional herbal remedies and are light years ahead of us in acceptance, regulation and use,” he says.
Kane-Berman’s Isiphethu Sempilo (Source of Health) company has the backing of township enterprises expert GG Alcock, a Zulu speaker and author of Kasinomics, a book on the informal business sector.
His agricultural blueprint aims to increase financial resilience for 40 poor households and farmers. He says prices for African ginger and African potato can average R140/kg, depending on plant biomass and species. Prices range between R80/kg and R450/kg with royalties on finished products, he says.
He calculates an annual spend on herbal ingredients of R10.7m for Isiphethu Sempilo to sell 40,000 bottles a month, paying an average of R140/kg for plant matter. He says farmers will need horticultural advice, pest management, risk analysis, seed, agricultural tools, irrigation equipment and tanks, plus fencing.
Kane-Berman started his company in 2020 but ran into Covid. He pivoted the business online, increasing his turnover tenfold between June 2021 and June 2022. To date he’s on R1.6m in sales turnover with wholly organic, tested, sweettasting products targeted at the middle to upper markets.
He wants to break into major pharmacy retail chains and is seeking investment of R60m-R70m to build a factory and distribution chain. He started off by supplying small pharmacies and retailers in Joburg and Durban and says research has shown that herbal remedies are the preferred choice of 80% of black South Africans. “There are 200 traditional healers for every GP in South Africa,” he says.
The absence of a written history and documentation of African medicinal drugs is another result of historical side
“There are 200 traditional healers for every GP in South Africa”
lining, he says. The only African herbal pharmacopoeia, he says, was printed in Mauritius in 2010 but is now out of print. It has 51 plant monographs and an estimated 25,000 recognised medicinal plants from South Africa.
Kane-Berman says 16% of South Africa’s medicinal plant biome is either extinct or in danger of becoming so. One example is African ginger, the harvesting of which is illegal outside conservation land. He says attention needs to be given to the 56 threatened traded medicinal plants, seven of which are on the critically endangered list.
The natural product industry has been contentious. Last April, the high court and a five-seat Roger Kane-Berman bench of the
Supreme Court of Appeal agreed with the Alliance of Natural Health Products that the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (Sahpra) has no legal jurisdiction to regulate substances that are not medicines or scheduled substances.
The court declared the 2017 regulations upon which Sahpra relied unlawful, and suspended its declaration of invalidity for 12 months to allow the minister of health to find an “appropriate legal path” to regulate the natural health product industry.
In spite of this legal delay, Kane-Berman wants to resurrect the industry, “giving it back to the people it belongs to”.
“The Khoisan didn’t see any benefits from the commercialisation of rooibos. We need to weather the storm and get African traditional remedies to penetrate markets all over the world on a solid, scientificallybacked basis that uplifts communities,” he says.