SAMNET wishes to highlight the need for proactive strategies to address South Africans’ unhealthy relationship with alcohol.

A wide range of research has established how deeply our society is affected by alcohol — its use and its abuse — across safety, healthcare, abuse, gender-based violence, road safety, education and criminality.

What works

Strategies shown to reduce the harm include limiting trading hours, limiting availability, limiting advertising, education programmes and raising prices. These matter most where the risk concentrates: high-density areas, sporting and social events, key holidays, vulnerable communities and educational environments.

In light of that evidence, we call on the authorities to implement proactive measures in those places and at those times.

The industry’s arguments

No amount of industry revenue, jobs or advertising spend justifies the personal, social and economic losses that alcohol harm imposes — and those three are, reliably, the industry’s arguments.

Regulation, by-laws and legislation are decisive in this fight. The majority of citizens, and particularly women and children, should not carry the risk created by the excesses of those who abuse alcohol.

South Africa’s lockdown restrictions provided an unusually clear natural experiment: trauma admissions, unnatural deaths, motor vehicle accidents and violent injury all fell sharply while alcohol sales were restricted, and rose again when they resumed. Reported domestic abuse and gender-based violence also fell during those periods, though the relationship between reporting and incidence under lockdown conditions is more complex. The case for greater control does not rest on the contested part.

Telling people to “drink responsibly”, or funding an addiction programme, has proved grossly insufficient and largely self-serving. The proliferation of alcohol in high-density, low-income communities through informal traders and unregulated shebeens carries real consequences, and greater control there is critical.

What we are calling for

SAMNET calls on the authorities, religious organisations and the broader civil society to press for stronger controls on alcohol advertising; stronger regulation and actual implementation of the regulations that exist; a complete review of our alcohol laws — the most recent Amendment Bill has been log-jammed in Parliament for close to ten years — and greater control over access, availability and trading hours.

We commend the City of Johannesburg for considering even the most basic controls, particularly given the strength of the alcohol lobby, which is often funded by the global industry.

We call on leaders at local, provincial and national level to do far more, urgently, in the face of a national alcohol crisis — one that can be addressed if we collectively admit to the relationship we have with it.

Let 2025 be the year South Africa changes how it deals with alcohol.

• City of Johannesburg CBD, New Year’s Eve — alcohol sales to stop at 6pm — Newzroom Afrika. SAPS reported minimal incidents the previous year when the same rule applied.
• Alcohol Harms Reduction Campaign — DG Murray Trust.

Related

Limpopo SAPS Calls for Shorter Trading Hours · Alcohol Harm Reduction — What Iceland Did · SAMRC: Femicide and Intimate Partners

Shared by the South African Muslim Network (SAMNET) in the interest of alcohol harm reduction in South Africa.