CAPE TOWN – South Africa is rewriting the rules on tobacco, and this time the science is in charge.

Last month, the Portfolio Committee on Health voted 10 to 1 on Tuesday to advance the Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Control Bill, but committee chairperson Faith Muthambi made one thing clear from the outset: this is not a victory lap.

“This vote is not an endorsement of the text as it stands. It is a mandate to improve it,” she pointed out in a statement.

The Bill arrives at this stage after one of the most extensive public consultations in South African legislative history.

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Extensive public input

“Every person who gave their time has a share in this,” Muthambi added.

The committee visited 27 municipalities across all nine provinces, heard nearly 7 900 people in person, received 52 online submissions from doctors, scientists, traditional healers, faith leaders and ordinary citizens. It also processed around 40 000 written submissions.

What the committee heard, and what now shapes the road ahead, is a crucial distinction: not all tobacco and nicotine products carry the same risk.

Cigarettes burn and produce smoke, which is the primary driver of tobacco-related disease. Vapes and heated products do not burn, and evidence shows they are meaningfully less harmful.

A law that treats these products identically, the committee concluded, is not stricter but simply less honest.

Muthambi pointed to the World Health Organisation’s own global tobacco treaty, which South Africa has signed, as backing for this approach. Harm reduction, she said, is not a loophole – it’s policy.

Evidence-led

That principle, however, comes with firm limits. No child should be exposed to nicotine in any form, Muthambi said, and a smarter framework makes that protection stronger, not weaker.

The committee also drew a hard line on South Africa’s illegal cigarette trade, one of the world’s largest, demanding penalties serious enough to match the threat. And it insisted that small informal traders and traditional healers be protected from blunt, disproportionate rules that could devastate livelihoods.

No African country has built a tobacco law that is genuinely evidence-led and built to last. South Africa, Muthambi argued, can be the first. “We can pass a law that other parliaments study – not because it was the harshest or the most permissive, but because it was the most intelligent one.”

The Bill now proceeds to line-by-line deliberations. “Let us do the harder, finer work of making it worthy of the people who gave us 40 000 reasons to get it right.”

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