Regulation is in the news this week, as we reflect in this edition:in steel, air travel, alcohol and, yes, toilet paper. Steel producer Mittal, part of the international steel empire owned by the fabulously wealthy Lakshmi Mittal, has been found guilty by the Competition Tribunal of excessive pricing. National carrier SAA, projecting a R650-million loss for the year, looks more like a massive begging bowl than an airline as it again asks for taxpayer support. Alcohol is cheap, insufficiently taxed and associated with some of our worst social evils such as crime, road accidents and the scourge of HIV/Aids. And, to round matters off, the criminal production of illegal toilet paper threatens the very basis of the new South Africa.
What’s to be done?
There will be those who will want to nationalise Mittal, privatise SAA, bring in prohibition and set up a special branch of the South African Police Service — no, make that the National Prosecuting Authority — to mount random seize and search operations on every suspicious toilet paper maker they can unearth. These unscrupulous vendors, after all, we’re told, are undermining a R1,5-billion industry.
But as varied as these cases are, they do reflect a basic truth and that is the case for sensible regulation. Mittal has no real competition, and has managed to set up a cosy export cartel with Macsteel’s Eric Samson, one of the country’s richest men. This has been to the detriment of the local manufacturing industry, exports and jobs growth.
Mittal and Samson are fat cats who deserve both intense heat and Âscrutiny from the competition authorities, including fines to deter their excessive pricing policies.
SAA is costing us all too much and there is a very strong case for the airline to scale back its aspirations drastically. Chief executive Khaya Ngqula can set an example by vacating 37 of the 38 board seats he occupies to focus on the job at hand.
There is little doubt that alcohol is poorly regulated. Booze is as cheap as life if we tally the numbers of road accidents and interpersonal Âviolence related to alcohol. We hear endlessly of the need to regulate the taxi industry but nothing about the need to formalise shebeens even though the latter would instantly add to formal employment while bringing numerous economic and social benefits to this industry and the communities it serves.
There is a strong need for consumer protection so that products reflect their contents accurately. Where industries set standards these can be included on the packaging. If you want to pay more for your toilet paper because it has a red Satma stamp on it, so be it.
But do we really need a law that says each roll of toilet paper has to have 500 perforated sheets, each sheet being 100mm by 110mm, with a core diameter of 40mm for each role? No.
It is all fixable really, but sense must prevail or we will choke on regulatory red tape. As a newspaper of a social democratic bent, we believe in regulation but think that hauling out the big guns to police the number of sheets of toilet paper is taking things a ply too far.
Normalise, don’t trivialise
The decision of the Life Offices Association to scrap HIV/Aids exclusions on life and disability policies from April 1 is a welcome and important step on the road to normalising HIV/Aids. The decision will allow HIVÂpositive people to take part in society equally, irrespective of their status.
At last we are moving on from the discrimination experienced by HIV-positive people in the past: the refusal to pay out dependants of life policy holders; the refusal to grant life cover, which meant they could not get housing finance. Now insurers will treat HIV/Aids like cancer, diaÂbetes or any other chronic illness. Antiretroviral therapy means that HIV/Aids is no longer a death sentence, provided, of course, that people are able to access testing, treatment and counselling.
Eliminating formal discrimination assists efforts to eliminate social Âdiscrimination against people with HIV/Aids. But institutions rarely change voluntarily, so we must recognise the role of social advocacy as a critical facilitator of change. The insurance industry’s decision is a response to the pressures of social actors such as the Aids Law Project and reflects how we as a society have adapted and must continue to adapt to the reality of the Aids pandemic as it matures.
Jurisprudence around HIV/Aids is still in the making. The R5 000 fine for a nurse found guilty of deliberately infecting a child with HIV fails to acknowledge the severity of the crime. The fact that we now have some medical treatments available to treat the syndrome makes this crime no less heinous. The lenient sentence also ignores the fact that, as a professional nurse, the perpetrator not only knew the consequences of her actions but also had a duty to safeguard the health of others, especially children. Just because HIV/Aids has become a daily reality for millions does not mean that we must trivialise the condition. The availability of treatment does not negate our responsibility to practise safe sex and to protect ourselves and others from contracting the virus.