It’s helpful for politicians to sometimes have an enemy of sorts—a scapegoat or something to blame when media attention ratchets up or becomes negative. This is a strategy Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has mastered. When he was the Minister of Home Affairs, illegal immigrants were often a target of his attention.
In his first stint as Minister of Health, he frequently criticised private healthcare costs. At one point in 2016, he stated that South African private healthcare was more expensive than that of OECD European countries, which is simply not true.
Last year, he criticised corruption in the private sector, claiming it reached R228 billion—a figure far too high to be believable, accounting for more than half of private healthcare spending. Unfortunately, complex issues like health costs have complex causes and no easy solution exists.
Recently, Motsoaledi, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos attacked sugar in the same speech where he blamed tobacco and alcohol for rising lifestyle diseases. However, these are not comparable. While smoking combustible cigarettes is undeniably harmful, reasonable amounts of sugar are not. In fact, our food is broken down into sugars in our bodies—it is literally life-giving.
Motsoaledi has made it clear he wants to reduce drinking and sugar consumption in South Africa. In both these cases, Motsoaeldi has used taxes to try and reduce consumption of sugar in beverages and alcohol, with little evidence the taxes doing anything but harm the economy.
National Treasury’s recent suggestion of increasing wine taxes is more likely to push people toward beer than stop South Africans drinking. The government needs to address health issues in a comprehensive manner that considers the economy and the people it serves rather than just hiking taxes. After all poorer people have worse health outcomes, so weakening the economy is bad for population health.
Implementing a sugar tax reduces jobs—something that happened following the health promotion levy in 2018 under Motsoaledi’s watch when over 16,000 jobs were lost. Increasing wine taxes will likely impact wine farms that employ unskilled agricultural labour with about half of wine farms already running at a loss. Unfortunately, it is easier to have an enemy to blame rather than dealing with complexity. It is easy to think taxes will change behaviour.
In the case of sugar, there is no evidence sugar-sweetened beverages are the primary drivers of obesity and lifestyle diseases in South Africa or that the sugar tax has worked to improve health. In the case of alcohol, raising taxes on wine, when the majority of drinkers drink beer won’t change drinking behavior of the population but will weaken the agricultural economy.
Motsoaeldi’s need for an enemy and a simple solution of taxes is unlikely to work but it will kill the economy and jobs- at a time South Africa can least afford it.
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