“We’re not going to make it beyond this point. We’re not going to make it beyond Sunday,” says Siwela Masoga, one of many black winemakers whose businesses verge on collapse in the face of SA’s fourth ban on alcohol sales.
Masoga studied biotechnology at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and worked at Distell, SA’s largest alcohol producer, and went on to self-fund her own wine label with her voluntary retrenchment package, her savings and a family loan.
The future of her business — which is reliant on online sales — is uncertain. She does not know how she will pay her four employees’ salaries at the end of the month.
The latest ban on alcohol sales was instituted two weeks ago in a bid to reduce the number of trauma cases in hospitals struggling to keep up with Covid-19 cases. It comes on the back of 19 weeks of liquor sales bans since March 2020 threatening the survival of many wine farms and small businesses.
In a survey by Vinpro, an industry body representing wine farms and wine growers, of the 549 members that responded, 120 said they were likely to close their business if the ban continued. Black-owned emerging wineries were in a dire financial position with almost half facing imminent closure.
Masoga launched a wine-tasting and eating venue in Kempton Park, Johannesburg, in March, with a vision to bring the Stellenbosch wine-tasting culture to Gauteng, where most of her buyers reside. But with her doors closed by the ban, cash and loans have dried up.
This time around, wine orders by consumers pending the end of the ban are lower than in previous bans, Masoga says. “Business is not business as usual. People don’t have money to buy at the moment.”
The liquor and hospitality industries argue they have been unfairly targeted as there are no limits on the numbers of people using public transport, for example. They have been granted no extra government support for the business yet, according to the liquor industry, and are paying the price for a tardy vaccine rollout.
Co-operative governance & traditional affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s in-court papers defended the action and said it was “not an exaggeration” that without a liquor ban, “the health system may become completely overwhelmed; and lives may be lost unnecessarily”.
The wine industry has incurred financial losses of more than R8bn since March 2020, says Vinpro MD Rico Basson.
“SA is the only country in which liquor sales have been banned with no financial assistance from national government, despite repeated requests from the wine industry,” he says.
Ntsiki Biyela, SA’s first black female winemaker, grew up in the rural village of Mahlabatini in KwaZulu-Natal. She spent her first year out of school as a domestic worker for members of her extended family. Then her former schoolteachers helped her apply for a scholarship to study winemaking or oenology at Stellenbosch University. She arrived at the university not speaking a word of Afrikaans.
Now running her own label, Aslina (in honour of her grandmother who raised her) she relies mainly on the export market that buys 90% of her award-winning wines.
She is based at Delheim winery where she worked as a student, She had planned to hire staff to run a local tasting room to grow her brand locally, but has now had to hold off on recruitment.
Speaking of the threat of constant bans, the uncertainty and anxiety that comes with it, Biyela says: “It’s really, really scary.”
She says: “The thing is, when you’re a small company, you don’t have much of a buffer. So when everything stops, you basically find yourself in panic mode.”
According to Vinpro, black-owned brands and farms receive 64% of their income from local sales, 27% from exports and 9% from other sources.
Masoga says the government’s belief that wine farms can survive by exporting is flawed.
“But it’s not as easy as that, like, you don’t just wake up and find a market in [for example] Uganda so that you can survive.”
Restaurants, many of which rely on alcohol sales to keep them profitable, have been closed for two weeks now. According to Vinpro, restaurants sell 18% to 20% of SA alcohol volumes.
Richard Lyon, CEO at Bizgro, a consultancy focused on training in the hospitality industry, asks why the restaurant industry has been “destroyed” by the government despite 99% of them complying with the Covid-19 cleaning and distancing regulations between tables.
The Restaurants Industry Association of SA has shared an ever-growing list of closed restaurants showing how decades-old businesses were shutting their doors, leaving employees and bosses destitute.
One owner wrote: “They are sending people to their deaths. Covid-19, you can get better but you don’t have a chance to survive if drained of money and not allowed to run your business.”
Others spoke of selling furniture online and losing their homes.
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