OPINION - Indian author and Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy recently wrote of the world lockdown: “we are being asked to give up everything - our privacy and our dignity, our independence - and allow ourselves to be controlled and micro-managed”.
Our National Coronavirus Command Council, in its pathological aversion to smoking and alcohol, has taken away our dignity and is now micro-managing us. I do not need a lecture on the social contract, or the rights of the individual versus the state and its people. I do not need to be told that smoking damages the lungs - my mother was a smoker and died an agonising death from lung cancer.
I do not need Minister of Police Bheki Cele to lecture me about the irresponsible behaviour of many drinkers and the danger they pose to our health system during this crisis. For the record, my son, a pulmonologist and critical care specialist, supports the temporary ban on alcohol.
As a 71-year-old, I am emphatically not in favour of the ban on cigarettes or alcohol, as I consider this an abrogation of my rights as a responsible taxpaying citizen. We cannot be held to ransom because a shebeen drinker beats up his girlfriend, or because Bheki Cele or Fikile Mbalula is paranoid about teetotalism. To promise smokers that the ban on cigarettes will be lifted, then to countermand this decision, was irrational, heartless and perverse.
Thank God I am not a smoker whose hopes were cruelly dashed by a vindictive government.
Who is the National Coronavirus Command Council to decide what is essential or non-essential to a human being? A fellow academic from New York City told me that their liquor and coffee stores are booming with trade. In most Western countries, and other parts of the world, alcohol is an adjunct to food. Even in some Islamic countries, alcohol is available to non-Muslims under strict conditions.
Covid-19 or no Covid-19, we will continue to have road deaths, murders, rape and spousal abuse. To think otherwise is to have a false sense of security.
All we drinkers and smokers ask of this government is to respect our rights as responsible citizens to decide what we regard as essential to our well-being, and not to treat us like infants and decide for us.
Harry Sewlall Extraordinary Professor, North-West University
Daily News