Smokin’ hot mobilisation
As the ban on tobacco sales drags into its third month, fed-up smokers are expected to protest in their thousands this week. The opposition has coalesced around Duncan Napier, who had no idea what he was starting,
Duncan Napier, the accidental hero of the smokers’ rights movement, gave up cigarettes in 2004. “I’m actually not even a smoker. I have a Twisp Click, probably the size of your little finger. I wanted pods and I ran out. It made me mad. On the spur of the moment I thought let’s do something, and we created a page. I’ve never been a facebooker, never been on social media. I’m an introvert. Crowds and social media are something I run away from.”
Until two weeks ago, Facebook was a place Napier had never been. “I set it up after watching some YouTube videos,” he says.
“It” is a page simply called Protest March Against The Tobacco Ban, which, as its name suggests, is calling on people to join a silent protest outside parliament on Tuesday.
Napier was unprepared for the response he received. Thousands of angry people — not all of them smokers — have found in him a channel for their fury. He estimates the page gets 1,000 likes a day. The Cape Town march has spread to Johannesburg, Durban, Pretoria, Newcastle, Port Elizabeth, Witbank …
“It was originally only meant to be in Cape Town,” he says. “By Friday [May 22] we had 300 people. On Saturday it got traction and people were e-mailing and inboxing and [saying] what about my area? And it grew from there.”
In short, the page went viral, which, everything considered, is apt. Napier thought it was because he had spent R500 on a Facebook ad.
“I thought it was getting traction because of my clever ad,” he says. “And then I got a thing the following day, ‘Oh, it [the ad payment] didn’t go through’. It was just pure word of mouth and people wanting it over with.”
Napier is a reluctant hero. He would prefer it if people didn’t come to the march. For one thing he is unsure if he needs a permit. He has done the rounds of Cape Town’s police stations, trying to find out what he needs to do.
“I wasn’t even allowed inside the door. It was just one-word answers and abrupt answers. So I just thought permit or not we’re gonna be there.”
The protest will take place just a stone’s throw from Milnerton, where Napier was born and still lives. He was one of 10 children, went to Milnerton High School — “a normal model C school” — and was raised under the strict edicts of the Brethren, a religious order. There was no radio or TV in the house and the children were dissuaded from mixing with other kids.
Instead, Napier was a voracious reader with tastes that ranged from Enid Blyton to histories.
He took his first drag of a cigarette at 16 as an act of rebellion. By the time he quit a decade later, he was smoking 40 a day.
That was 16 years ago. But for Napier, the memory of going cold turkey — lying curled up in the foetal position under a blanket for a week, enduring the sweat and cravings and pain — is so visceral, it underpins the urgency of his protest.
“It takes something out of your body,” he says. “It’s almost like you’re being pulled through the bush backwards. There’s no words or adverts or editorials on how to take you through it step by step. People need that. Otherwise they will die. It’s hard on the body.”
He is under no illusion that smoking is bad for you and that electronic cigarettes are not much better. But he disagrees, with revolutionary fervour, with the government’s reasons for the tobacco ban, spelt out in an affidavit to the high court by Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the minister of co-operative governance & traditional affairs, on May 26.
Dlamini-Zuma’s affidavit — a response to an action launched by the Fair Trade Independent Tobacco Association to overturn the ban — purportedly draws on four separate studies showing a link between smoking and severe cases of Covid-19.
Smokers, with their assumed underlying comorbidities such as lung and heart disease, are more likely to fare badly if they fall ill with Covid-19, the affidavit says.
Because smokers have increased “receptor sites” onto which the virus can latch, they are also 2.4 times more likely to end up in intensive care and need ventilators compared with nonsmokers, or so the studies say.
Never mind that Dlamini-Zuma may have cited one set of statistics three different ways, according to an analysis in Business Insider — the government reckons the science supporting its case is strong.
The affidavit also raises concerns over the sharing of cigarettes and “hookah pipes, zol, skyf and/or lighters and matchboxes”, along with the risk of viral transmission from sharing hand-rolled, spit-sealed cigarettes.
Yes, the government is “sympathetic to the concerns of those for whom it would be difficult to abstain from smoking”. It thinks it would be better for smokers to use the time to quit. In closing, the affidavit offers some tips for anyone in the grip of withdrawal and perhaps about to take an axe to their home.
“About 95% of smokers also quit on their own without any medication or formal help,” it says. “The first week, especially days 3 through 5, is usually the most difficult.”
Napier dismisses the government’s reasoning as “nonsense”.
Take the trade in “loosies”, or individual cigarettes.
“Children are standing on the street corner. They have loose cigarettes which they sell for R20 each. They buy a box for 50, 60 bucks and sell each one for R20 to take home and feed their families,” Napier says.
“The thing is, if you buy a cigarette for R20, it’s a lot of money and that actually causes you to share that one cigarette a lot more.”
Not many of the loosies will be known brands. More likely they will come from bottom-of-the-barrel manufacturers, brands that even hardened smokers say strip the flesh from their throats.
Napier tears up as he reads from a statement from the SA Tobacco Transformation Alliance about the booming illegal trade, which has been posted to his page.
The alliance chair, Ntando Shadrack Sibiso, who farms tobacco in
Mpumalanga, says the consultations around the lockdown process were “a sham” and that “other interests” were at play.
For the bootleggers, whoever they are, lockdown has been a boom time. For smokers, not so much.
“They just want to do something legally instead of having to go further and further and further out of their districts to try and hunt down a carton of smokes,” says Napier.
“I mean it’s R900 for a carton of Chicago cigarettes and that is the cheapest of the cheap, it really is poison. And they’re interacting with more strangers.”
There is a picture on Napier’s Facebook page of two police officers having a quick smoke break next to their van. Their body language is that of school kids who have been busted having a cheeky gwaai behind the classrooms.
The picture reminds Napier of the years he spent as a paramedic in Cape Town when everybody smoked after traumatic call-outs.
“Now you can’t even buy Nicorettes in the local pharmacy, it’s off the shelf,” he says. “That’s not smoking. You don’t share your bubblegum.”
And so Napier will reluctantly take to the streets on Tuesday. The protesters will line up silently outside parliament, their
It takes something out of your body. It’s almost like you’re being pulled through the bush backwards. There’s no words or adverts or editorials on how to take you through it step by step. People need that. Otherwise they will die. It’s hard on the body
Duncan Napier On quitting smoking
arms spread wide to ensure social distancing, hoping that the government gets the message.
“I really support the president,” says Napier, who describes himself as a proud ANC voter.
“Cyril Ramaphosa is the only person who can take this country forward and we need to support him. It’s just that he has a poisoned chalice.”
He compares Ramaphosa with Winston Churchill, who after years in the political wilderness took on the leadership of Britain at its bleakest hour.
“Churchill said it’s like they’ve done it for revenge, and it’s almost like Ramaphosa’s got the presidency now as a form of revenge. It’s intense what he’s going through. We all know what’s the right thing, he knows what’s right. He’s the top drawer, that guy.”