“IF LAST week’s Liquor Amendment Bill is anything to go by, thinking about liquor makes some politicians and bureaucrats more intoxicated than drinking it.
They become incoherent megalomaniacs with delusional conceptions of causality. They think billboards advertising liquor on straight roads are better than ones near corners (as opposed to an intersections); that they know when 20-year-olds (as opposed to 21-year-olds) listen to radios; that people old enough to be the president are too young for wine with meals; that people who provide liquor should be vicariously liable for crimes unrelated to liquor; and that “the National Liquor Regulator must the minister may delegate powers …” (sic) is English”.
Is prohibition Aaron Motsoaledi’s end game?” Leon Louw today in BDlive published by Business Day.
Further excerpts
Superficially, that is coherent even if nuts, but if you pause long enough to use another synapse, you will realise that places of worship include chapels at wedding venues and prayer rooms in multistory buildings. Public institutions include post offices and clinics in shopping centres. Schools include small public, private, church and community institutions, and other schools almost everywhere. Consider yourself blessed in the unlikely event that you know somewhere where it will be lawful to produce, store, distribute or sell liquor.
During its early years, the ANC was sophisticated, respectful and tolerant. What happened? Its 1997 Liquor Policy and 2003 Liquor Act insightfully described the obnoxious nature of apartheid liquor law. It proclaimed emancipation, dignity and respect for South Africans.
An integral part of dismantling apartheid was easy entry into the liquor industry and easy access to liquor for liberated adults. It celebrated the decline in liquor-related crime and drunkenness, and the blossoming of thousands of decriminalised outlets.
. . . . .
Since the Constitutional Court ruled at late President Nelson Mandela’s behest that liquor licensing was an exclusive provincial competence, the bill is, in any event, unconstitutional.