Johannesburg - impractical, senseless and a threat to their business.
This is how liquor industry associations described Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi’s plan to ban smoking in public places yesterday.
In October last year, the minister said: “We are going to ban total smoking in public areas. At the moment, we have put a corner in restaurants and a corner at the airport.
“We have also, stupidly, even put a corner at the hospital,” he said.
He was speaking at the launch of a 24-hour health television channel in Alexandra, Joburg.
Yesterday, the South African Liquor Traders Association (Salta) and the Township Liquor Industry Association (Tolia) said that while they weren’t planning to tackle the minister’s proposal in court, they were vehemently opposed to the department’s plan and would make their voices heard.
“These proposals are not going to achieve anything that is good. Businesses in townships struggle to make a living as it is.
“At the moment, smokers go to designated smoking areas or outside to smoke, and this means that both smokers and non-smokers are happy,” Salta presidents Mish Hlophe said.
He pointed out that their members - both Salta and Tolia, which represent 50 000 people - were promoting health at their taverns and business areas already by having designated areas for smokers.
He said, however, it was impractical to ask people to stand 10m outside the business to smoke.
“If people aren’t able to smoke in public, they won’t visit our businesses, and if they don’t visit, we don’t make a living, we don’t employ people and we don’t eat.
“There are a number of big issues with the minister’s proposal, not least of which is that, as a country, we have bigger issues to fix than trying to police where and when people choose to smoke,” he continued.
Motsoaledi has on numerous occasions decried the dangers of smoking on individual health as well as the burden it places on the country’s healthcare system through lifestyle diseases such as lung cancer that it could induce.
Last month, civil rights organisation the Free Market Foundation slated the minister’s stance, saying it was an “assault on civil liberties and individual freedom”.
Hlophe argued health officials should concentrate on fixing the “collapsing healthcare system” instead of being fixated on “silly laws”.
THE STAR