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Cooperative Governance Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma says the government is acting cautiously when it comes to opening South African alcohol sales under lockdown level 1.
Answer questions about the restriction of the sale of alcohol on weekends under the new regulations, Dlamini-Zuma said the government has learned lessons from the past.
“Alcohol sales are restricted so that we don’t do it in a ‘bang’ and find out there are unforeseen problems like in the past,” he said.
The minister refers to when alcohol sales first opened, low blocking level 3. She said that when that happened, trauma cases increased, which later led to sales going back to being. temporarily prohibited.
At the time, hospitals were under heavy pressure, he said. Even though health centers are not under the same pressure now, the government was learning from the past and chose to proceed with caution.
Alcohol sales will gradually open, he said.
When asked about criticism from those who operate in the alcohol industry, such as wine farms, who say that weekend bans would negatively affect their businesses, Dlamini-Zuma said there were no exemptions to the regulations.
He said that the sale of alcohol for external consumption was restricted between Monday and Friday. For those selling liquor for consumption on the spot, they are limited only by the curfew.
Wine sellers have said that the continued restriction on the sale of alcohol on weekends will have an extremely negative impact on the sustainability of wine estates that attract large numbers of visitors and tourists, especially at such times.
Wine farms depend on the direct sale of wineries for domestic consumption and the industry is denied the opportunity to recover economically.
Curfew
Regarding the curfew, Dlamini-Zuma said the government does not want people to sit in pubs and restaurants for “hours and hours”, drinking.
“This leads to chaos,” he said. “When people start drinking, they get drunk, they forget about the mask, they forget about social distancing. You don’t want that chaos to continue until morning. “
She said that with curfew, people at least have a time frame in which they know they have to leave a place and go home. She said this logic applies to all meetings, not just pubs and restaurants, adding that it is a mistake to think that the pandemic is over and that everything is safe.
“Some of the countries that have now had 10,000 infections again were down to a few hundred, and they thought everything was fine.
“We need to understand that we are not out of the woods… the storm is still going on. We can’t just open up all night for people to drink and sit together for hours on end. That is why there are still limits in the meetings, those are the places that will still spread the virus, “she said.
“The logic is that the pandemic is still with us, so we must proceed with caution.”
Read: The latest alcohol rules in South Africa are a ‘punch to the stomach’
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