The damage caused by alcohol abuse is grossly disproportionate to the number of people who abuse alcohol, according to a major liquor company.
While only 30 percent of South Africans consume alcohol, a third of them abusing it, the cost to the country of that abuse is huge, said SA Breweries (SAB) transformation director Dr Vincent Maphai.
Maphai was speaking at this week’s launch of the company’s Responsible Traders Programme at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, which was attended by 1 800 local liquor traders.
The target of the programme is to train 10 000 traders nationally.
Maphai said that although he was proud of the liquor industry’s job creation achievements, he was embarrassed and not proud of drunk people creating problems, shebeen activities which keep neighbours awake late at night, drunk drivers who cause accidents and pregnant women who destroy the lives of their unborn children by drinking alcohol.
“We need to keep the benefits of the industry and destroy the damage abuse does,” he said.
Maphai called on traders to obey the conditions of their licences, keep young people out of their taverns, and not to sell alcohol to visibly pregnant women.
If they continued selling liquor to already drunk people, he warned, they could have blood on their hands.
To help address the problems associated with alcohol abuse, SAB has removed its advertising billboards from areas where there are high rates of foetal alcohol syndrome, and reduced the number in poverty-stricken areas.
Maphai also called for the “normalisation” and legalisation of shebeens, so that the “artificial criminalisation” of traders could end.
He suggested that liquor licence allocation in the province was still racially biased, with SAB’s research from 2007 showing that only seven percent of these licences were held by tavern owners.
Their studies also showed that there was one liquor licence for every 95 adults in the central city, compared to just one licence for every 4 500 adults in Khayelitsha.
It was also believed that up to 70 percent of the shebeen trade was illegal, Maphai added.
Chairman of the Liquor Board Raybin Windvogel said at the meeting that, as at the end of March, there were 7 767 licence holders in the Western Cape, with 1 800 applications pending.
During the 2010/11 financial year, he revealed, three licences were withdrawn, four suspended and one had more stringent conditions imposed on it.
He said the numbers were low because the position of head of the inspectorate had been vacant for a long time.
Both the Liquor Board and the SAPS conducted routine unannounced inspections of licensed premises, and Windvogel said the number of these inspections was up more than 100 percent in the past six months when compared to the same period a year ago, thanks to the board appointing more inspectors.
Finance, Economic Development and Tourism MEC Alan Winde told the meeting there were about 23 000 illegal shebeens in the Western Cape.
But he said that there did appear to be a higher level of compliance recently.
Winde said 861 licensed premises had been inspected in the past four months.
“Any deviations are viewed as extremely serious, (and) we will crack down on those who are flouting the terms of their licences,” he warned.
On the implementation of the new Western Cape Liquor Act, Winde said it was due to come before the cabinet at the end of the month.
Along with municipal by-laws on liquor trading hours and the provincial substance abuse strategy, the new act would be more co-ordinated to ensure higher levels of monitoring in order to achieve higher levels of compliance.
Windvogel said the liquor trade situation was considerably better than it was about a year ago.
The new act was also likely to raise community participation in the licensing process, he added, and increase the monitoring of premises where liquor was sold.
“This is arguably one of the best forms of control,” Windvogel said.
esther.lewis@inl.co.za - Cape Argus
