The chair of parliament’s health portfolio committee, Sibongiseni Dhlomo (ANC), recently moved to have Dr Kgosi Letlape (ActionSA) recused from work on the Tobacco Bill. His reason? A supposed “conflict of interest” because Letlape cofounded the Africa Tobacco Harm Reduction Alliance.
Opposition parties quickly pushed back, rightly defending a respected doctor whose only fault seems to be speaking too persuasively against the bill. Letlape’s medical background and credibility make him a formidable critic, hardly the type of voice those intent on pushing prohibitionist policies want around the table.
The tobacco bill aims to clamp down on both smoking and vaping, despite global evidence that harm reduction — shifting smokers away from burning tobacco towards vaping — is far more effective from a health perspective. For instance, Public Health England has found vaping to be 95% less harmful than smoking.
Yet instead of embracing this pragmatic approach ANC legislators are intent on wielding the blunt instrument of prohibition. This is not the first time Letlape has unsettled SA’s dominant political party. Recently he fronted ActionSA’s legislative proposal that public representatives should be forced to use the same crumbling public healthcare system as ordinary South Africans.
While the ANC has overseen decades of decline in public health its leaders enjoy the use of private clinics. Letlape and ActionSA’s position on this matter is difficult — dare I say impossible — to argue against, which I am sure does not sit well with his ANC colleagues on the health committee.
But the real driving force behind the Tobacco Bill lies beyond SA’s borders. The convenient scapegoat of “Big Tobacco” hides the influence of a foreign anti-consumer choice lobby, lavishly funded by figures like American billionaire Michael Bloomberg and institutions such as the World Health Organisation (WHO). These groups, pushing agendas never mandated in an SA election, seek ultimately to destroy consumer choice in smoking, sugar consumption and other things they deem “unhealthy”.
Bloomberg Philanthropies has poured billions into lobbying worldwide and even set up a $20m project dedicated exclusively to silencing the tobacco industry. Meanwhile, the WHO has pushed “sin tax” hikes of 50% in developing countries like SA. Such measures only fuel the illicit trade, which pays no tax, respects no regulations and now completely dominates the domestic cigarette market.
SA’s own academics and institutions have been drawn into this orbit. The University of Cape Town’s Economics of Tobacco Control Project, funded by foreign donors including the Gates Foundation and the WHO, played a central facilitative role in the socioeconomic assessment of the 2018 version of the bill. The assessment unsurprisingly (and unscientifically) concluded that the bill would yield many wonderful benefits alongside only negligible costs.
Had this project been bankrolled by tobacco companies, critics would be screaming “conflict of interest!” But because the funding flows from “respectable” foreign institutions, the hypocrisy goes largely unchallenged.
It was cloud cuckoo land stuff. Had this project been bankrolled by tobacco companies, critics would be screaming “conflict of interest!” But because the funding flows from “respectable” foreign institutions, the hypocrisy goes largely unchallenged.
Doctors like Letlape and Delon Human, both founders of the Africa Tobacco Harm Reduction Alliance, the latter of whom recently identified Bloomberg Philanthropies and the WHO as the biggest obstacles to tobacco harm reduction due to their prohibitionist attitudes, stand almost alone in advancing harm reduction as an alternative to prohibition.
In his 2020 presidential bid in the US Bloomberg promised to ban flavoured vapes. This is indicative of an ideological imperative, not an evidence-based approach that respects how flavoured vapes have played a key role in weaning many off cigarettes.
As responsible medical professionals, Letlape and Human’s position is obviously not that smoking is harmless, but that adults deserve safer options rather than being herded towards the black market.
One is allowed to dislike smoking and oppose tobacco products. But no-one is entitled to their own facts. The fact is this: people who want to smoke will smoke. This is why these high taxes and regulations the likes of Bloomberg and the WHO have lobbied for to make cigarettes more expensive have backfired.
Illicit tobacco trade does not pay taxes
The illicit tobacco trade does not pay taxes or abide by regulations, so this more affordable market is where most South African smokers now acquire their products. Whereas the tobacco industry is regulated, serves a real market demand — whether one approves of smoking or not — and employs hundreds of thousands of South Africans, the far better funded anti-choice lobby employs a tiny handful of academics and activists who arrogantly believe they have the right to tell people how they should live.
This is why the work of people like Dr Letlape and other harm-reductionists is so important. Prohibition does not work — it invariably backfires — but making better alternatives available does help significantly. And while Dhlomo paints Dr Letlape as conflicted, he himself is hardly neutral. Dhlomo was the deputy health minister when his department unveiled the 2022 iteration of the Tobacco Bill.
Today, as committee chair in parliament, he is supposed to scrutinise the proposals and initiatives of the very department whose policies he once championed. In fact, in June 2022 he said it was “urgent” that government “tighten regulatory measures to control tobacco,” directly defending the bill over which he is now supposedly acting as referee. If that is not a conflict of interest, what is?
South Africans should see the tobacco bill for what it is: a misguided, foreign-backed attempt to curtail freedom of choice, enrich smugglers and silence credible dissent. Dr Letlape is one of the few voices of reason and medical expertise standing in the way. Parliament should be amplifying, not persecuting, him.
• Van Staden is head of policy at the Free Market Foundation and SA policy fellow at the Consumer Choice Centre.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.