It’s clear that the hawks at the government’s national coronavirus command council were never going to get their wish for SA to be thrust back into an alcohol-and nicotine-free level 5 lockdown, given the bruising court judgment last week against co-operative governance minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma’s five-month tobacco ban.In case you’ve already blocked out all memory of the dark days of SA’s most irrational Covid-related restrictions, the government — or its representative, Dlamini Zuma, heroine of such dramas as Virodene and Sarafina 2 — barred sales of tobacco, given its propensity to spread Covid, maim lungs and gobble up precious hospital space.Last week, the Western Cape High Court ruled that regulation 45, which she used to implement the ban, "does not withstand constitutional scrutiny". In the 157-page ruling, the three judges said the government could not show that the tobacco prohibition "reduced or acted to reduce the strain on the health-care system". The science that...
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