Peter Bruce

Vector-in-chief sucker-punches SA’s smokers

Something happened. On Thursday April 23 President Cyril Ramaphosa appeared on television to announce the introduction of level 4 lockdown restrictions from May 1, which would ease a fiveweek total Covid-19 lockdown. One of the standout relaxations was that the sale of tobacco products would, at level 4, resume. Then, last Wednesday, co-operative governance & traditional affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma held a briefing in which she announced the final level 4 regulations. She said the sale of tobacco products would remain prohibited, directly contradicting Ramaphosa’s promise.

Dlamini-Zuma had on Saturday held a briefing in which the public and press were invited to ask questions. Towards the end, she took an anonymous question so carefully framed it may easily have been deliberately planted. What, the questioner asked, was the science and research used to decide to lift the tobacco ban? A very, very fine question, Dlamini-Zuma said. She would take it back to the national command council for review and, she added at the end of her answer, “quite rightly so”. Dlamini-Zuma has been campaigning against smoking for more than 20 years.

In the ensuing uproar, for and against the final decision, between smokers and nonsmokers, all sorts of theories have been bandied about. She had undermined Ramaphosa or organised a rebellion against him. She was now effectively a prime minister, Ramaphosa reduced to a mere figurehead.

The fact is no-one has any idea of what goes on inside the cabinet. It’s a chronic lacuna in our journalism. We know Cyril has been very considerate to Dlamini-Zuma since he beat her to the ANC leadership in 2017 and despite the high probability that her campaign was funded by the Gupta family. He has gone out of his way to give her new local government strategy, the so-called district development model, attention and time despite it being nothing special.

There would be no point in her humiliating him now. Politically, if she has any ambitions, this is way too early. The same would go for health minister Zweli Mkhize, who is enjoying a good epidemic. But the virus is not finished with us and may yet make fools of the high and mighty.

French and Chinese studies being reported seriously, suggest that smoking may in fact protect the lungs from the coronavirus, though no-one knows how or why. And in just the last few days reports have begun to tumble out of the US and Europe that seem to explain the high death rate among people on ventilators by implying that Covid-19 may have been misidentified — that it is not a pneumonia but rather a bronchial thrombosis. Covid-19 patients are dying of strokes, heart attacks and organ failure. Post-mortems increasingly reveal lungs peppered with blood clots. Bed and aspirin may turn out to be an adequate treatment. Who knows?

So, good luck with that. Still, I was stunned at the reversal of Ramaphosa’s promise. It was blatantly unfair. Dlamini-Zuma told us that of the 70,000 e-mails received in response to the guidelines she discussed on the Saturday, 2,000 supported maintaining the smoking ban. That’s patently unjust as smokers would have e-mailed in their millions (I don’t smoke but up to 11-million South Africans do) had they not already been told by their president they soon would be allowed to buy tobacco again.

They were sucker-punched. Dlamini-Zuma will not care a jot but Ramaphosa should. The decision, whether or not he eventually supported it, has done him significant reputational damage. It is going to be harder now to take Ramaphosa’s word. You can laugh that off for a few million smokers but when you are promising to create a “new and fair and inclusive” economy out of the coronavirus shambles we will become, Ramaphosa’s word is going to matter a great deal. He had better find a way to repair the damage (either done to him or self-inflicted) and soon.

As for Dlamini-Zuma, with every passing day she does more harm than good, forcing the poor at the point of a gun to lock themselves inside tiny shacks where viral transfer is inevitable, forcing them to share scarce and illicit zols because they can’t buy their own cigarettes, allowing mourners to gather 50 at a time at funerals.

Our vector-in-chief is an imperious, spoilt bully and has been from the first signs of state corruption around Sarafina and her Trump-like indulgence of an industrial solvent called virodene to treat HIV-Aids, to her long dalliance with the Guptas. No wonder much of Africa celebrated when she left the job they had organised for her at the AU while they prepared the ground back here for her to become president. We still have a little to be thankful for.