Cut the RET tape around food distribution… or else

Despite the spin, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s flip-flop on lockdown cigarette sales has dented his credibility. It’s a comeback for the radical economic transformation (RET) brigade which backed Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma in the 2017 ANC leadership contest.

The RET group supporting the tobacco ban straddles the ANC and Julius Malema’s EFF. Both have documented links to cigarette trader Adriano Mazzotti, who denies involvement with the tobacco ban. Alleged links between Dlamini-Zuma and Mazzotti are widely publicised, with photos. Mazzotti has not sued The President’s Keepers author Jacques Pauw or anyone else in this regard. Mazzotti is also a known EFF funder.

South Africans have not stopped smoking. The capricious ban benefits off-grid cigarette trade, depriving the fiscus of billions of rands which are desperately needed for food and other relief.

Considering the love of money in these dealings, it is hypocritical of RET flag bearer Dlamini-Zuma to quote socialist Amilcar Cabral when announcing restrictions. She sees lockdown as “an opportunity to accelerate the implementation of some long agreed-upon structural changes to enable reconstruction, development and growth”.

That’s radical economic transformation.

“These opportunities call for more sacrifices and – if needs be – what Amilcar Cabral called ‘class suicide’, wherein we must rally behind the common cause,” she said.

Rich, tobacco-funded RET fans are not making sacrifices. They are cashing in. In addition to off-grid tobacco money, they are trying to control funding and distribution of food to the poor. Herein lie seeds of catastrophe. Private organisations and individuals are being thwarted by red tape when trying to get permits to distribute food. Government wants to centralise this function under what MP James Lorimer calls an incapable state.

“There have been reports of individuals being arrested and NGOs being harassed by law enforcement officials for handing out food in communities – all because they did not have proper documentation,” he said.

If all donations and food deliveries are entrusted to government officials, starvation will soar exponentially. If it were not for herculean private-sector efforts, from individual suburbanites and giant corporations, food riots would already be out of control.

Dlamini-Zuma mentions class suicide. The local version resembles class euthanasia, with a racist slant where businesses are wiped out in order to achieve RET. What she calls “some long agreed-upon structural changes” will lead to great depression, worse than the current recession.

RET control freaks are incapable of leading South Africa out of this hole.

One priority is to resist the attempts to prohibit private food aid. Advocate and academic James Grant writes: “There is an overriding defence in law [known as necessity[ that allows one to act in an emergency and to break the law where the interest at stake is more important than observing the technicalities of the law.

“Where someone is unable to buy food … [has tried official channels] … and is facing hunger or starvation, the circumstances for the defence kick in and the technical prohibition is overridden by the emergency of needing to get food to people who would otherwise go hungry or starve.”

That is our most urgent immediate task. Cut the red (RET) tape around food distribution. Or else.

Martin Williams, DA councillor and former editor of The Citizen.

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