Participants cited the failure of government departments to come up with a common stance on cannabis and territorial battles by senior bureaucrats as being among the reasons for their withdrawal.
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Civil society organisations, labour federation Cosatu and business have pulled out of the working group on the government’s national cannabis master plan in frustration over a lack of progress towards developing a framework for legal trade.
Participants cited the failure of government departments to come up with a common stance on cannabis and territorial battles by senior bureaucrats as being among the reasons for their withdrawal.
The master plan process is driven by the department of land reform, agriculture and rural development and the department of trade, industry and competition, but involves 10 government departments, which participants say have been unable to achieve “policy coherence”.
A cannabis plan is central to the “green economy” President Cyril Ramaphosa has said several times, and Cosatu, Business Unity South Africa (Busa) and a number of other organisations have been drawn into the working group trying to develop policy with the government.
Cosatu deputy parliamentary coordinator Tony Ehrenreich, who sits in the working group, said they had pulled out over the government’s unwillingness to “ensure that the historical farmers of cannabis in South Africa are able to benefit from the legalisation of the industry”.
Ehrenreich said there had been a “significant stalling of the process” over the failure to come up with some form of transitional arrangements to “make sure that we move from a situation where cannabis is illegal to one where it is legal”.
Government had focused on a high-end, corporate licensing regime that allowed big companies to invest in medical cannabis, and on over-regulating hemp, while continuing to criminalise the traditional — and still illegal — recreational cannabis sector. Departments had no shared perspective, with some adopting a prohibitionist approach, and others dragging their heels in developing a consistent, coherent policy.
The trade and industry department had embraced the process and was pushing ahead but “other departments, not so much”, Ehrenreich said. “There has been a paralysis. Government never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity, in this case to stimulate a new industry that is waiting to be developed.”
Enrenreich said, however, that following a meeting last week with the master plan secretariat, a process was being discussed to bring participants back to the table.
Ayanda Bam, one of the Busa representatives on the working group, said they had pulled out after “some very difficult engagements with government” over issues including the exclusion of heritage cannabis growers from the process, a lack of cohesion among government departments and uneven and irregular participation by government officials.
Bam said that there had been “no inclusion or thought of inclusion” of growing communities by the agriculture department, along with a refusal to consider transitional or interim measures that would begin regularising the industry and end arrests of growers and traders.
Reggie Ngcobo, the spokesperson for Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development Minister Thoko Didiza, said the process involved several departments and the “existing legal impediments as provided for under the Drugs Act is one of the major challenges” that had delayed the implementation of the cannabis master plan.
“It has not been decided which department will pilot the enabling whole plant legislation,” Ngcobo said, adding a “roadmap” for this process was “still to be developed”.
The bungling around the master plan is not the government’s only misstep with regard to cannabis, which was illegal in South Africa until 2018, when the constitutional court declared the ban on personal and private use, possession and cultivation to be unconstitutional.
The government was given two years to draft legislation, but the Cannabis for Private Purposes Bill was only released for public comment this week, more than four years later. It limits the amount of cannabis (to 600g) and the number of plants a person can possess and imposes jail sentences of up to 15 years for dealing in the legal plant.
This has enraged cannabis activists, and is likely to spark a high court challenge should the bill be passed in its current form. Myrtle Clarke of the NGO Fields of Green for All, who was part of the group that secured the 2019 judgment, said should the bill be passed as is, she would immediately go back to court.
“This bill is an insult. It ignores everything that people have worked towards for more than 12 years. The bill doesn’t draw from an evidence base, but is coming from a place of stigma,” Clarke said. “In its present form, the bill is not constitutionally sound.”
Fields of Green, which focuses on strategic litigation aimed at cannabis legislation, is involved in several other court actions, including a supreme court of appeal challenge to a high court ruling delivered against the Haze Club cannabis club.
Clarke said while the state was dragging its feet, arrests of growers and traders were continuing. The NGO’s helpline, which had dealt with 15 cases a day before the 2019 judgment, is still receiving 10 calls a week from people being arrested for growing and trading.
“The failure to come up with a proper, evidence based policy is perpetuating a dastardly situation. People are still being arrested, locked up and subjected to serious human rights abuses at the hands of the police,” Clarke said.
“It’s an incredibly frustrating situation.”