“This Is How Durban Plans to Combat Alcohol Misuse”
IOL reports:
“The Association for Alcohol Responsibility and Education (Aware.org) expressed its willingness to partner with the Durban Metro Police Services (DMPS) by providing equipment and operational support to enhance law enforcement visibility, operational effectiveness, and service delivery within eThekwini.
“Under the MOA, the municipality is expected to accept equipment and resources donated to support municipal law enforcement operations.”
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Assessment
The memorandum of agreement was outlined in a report by the eThekwini Security and Emergency Services committee, presented to the municipality’s executive committee on Tuesday. Under it, the municipality would accept donated equipment and resources for municipal law enforcement, with the stated aims of “improving enforcement visibility in identified hotspots, traffic policing, by-law enforcement and crime prevention”.
The campaign attached to the partnership is to focus on underage alcohol use, road safety and alcohol-free pregnancies.
Aware.org is the alcohol industry’s front group in South Africa, funded by the country’s major alcohol producers, distributors and retailers – among its documented funders are global alcohol industry giants Diageo and Heineken Beverages, which absorbed Distell in 2023.
The municipality’s own report describes the organisation as representing the alcohol industry’s response to concerns about alcohol harm. Its work follows the pattern Movendi International documented when the alcohol industry moved to pre-empt people-centred policy in South Africa: education and “responsible consumption” campaigns that keep the focus on individual behaviour, while the same industry lobbies against the pricing, availability and marketing policies that are effective and proven to reduce alcohol consumption and harm at population level.
Underage alcohol use, road safety and pregnancy are the topics on which the alcohol industry tries to whitewash its image and reputation. But the same industry opposes the real solutions that would benefit young people, road safety, and alcohol-free pregnancies.
Treasury’s own estimate is that around 59% of people who use alcohol in the country do so in heavy episodic patterns. That is the pattern behind the weekend trauma load, interpersonal violence and much of the roughly 37,000 deaths a year linked to alcohol – and that harm is concentrated in the legal, heavily marketed products at the centre of the industry’s sales.
A police service accepting equipment from the alcohol industry is a step beyond the usual awareness campaigns. The donations would make municipal law enforcement materially dependent on the industry whose products account for much of what that enforcement deals with – and in return, the alcohol industry gets to present itself as a partner of law enforcement at the exact moment its lobbying arms are contesting the National Treasury’s alcohol tax reform.
Movendi International has documented the same conflict of interest where a beer giant funded screening and treatment for the alcohol problems its products cause: the funder gains reputational credit and a claim to partnership status, and the public institution takes on a donor with a direct commercial stake in how its mandate is exercised.
The agreement is not yet concluded – the report puts it before the executive committee as an intention. Whether eThekwini’s council approves the memorandum, and on what terms of transparency, will show how far South African municipalities are willing to let the alcohol industry into the machinery of enforcement.