FERIAL HAFFAJEE: There's no smoke without ire in the big tobacco business
The truth is more complex than the picture painted in the study
One of the first things Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma did as health minister was to get tough on smoking - the ANC's first big fight was with big smoke. Soon after 1994, South Africa introduced far-reaching and far-sighted anti-smoking legislation which helped to reduce the number of smokers from 5.8 million to 2.7 million. Since then, the ANC government has got progressively more muscly with smokers, who now have to do a half-marathon at work to get to a spot where they can smoke after new regulations were passed further increasing the perimeter for smoke-free zones. One of the last things Dlamini-Zuma did as she completed her attempted run at the ANC presidency last year was to deny that illicit cigarette kingpin Adriano Mazzotti had funded her campaign, although the story was made more difficult to bat away by the photographs of him grinning alongside her. Cigarettes are big business in South Africa, and, because prices are so high, there was an effective prohibition by price, so a boot...
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