Government’s ‘command and control’ approach to cannabis reform has failed, and the test as to whether it can genuinely unlock the plant’s economic potential going forward, lies in the rolling hills of Mpondoland.
‘Sort out Mpondoland and you’ll sort out South Africa’ has long been the conventional wisdom around creating a vibrant, inclusive cannabis economy. However, government has failed to grasp this key tenant despite mouthing all the right sentiments.
By over-promising and failing to deliver, Government has marginalized the intended beneficiaries of cannabis reform and the DTIC will have to return to the drawing board with one overarching question that needs to be answered: What is to be done about Mpondoland?
There are probably over 60 000 ha of illicit cannabis being cultivated in the area – that’s more than the entire hemp fields of Europe – and thousands of communities who have made a living out of the plant for generations. Government’s failure to accommodate them has led to the collapse of current reform initiatives.
Two recent stakeholder policy summits – the Cheeba Summit at the Cannabis Expo at the end of June, and ICS 2026 at the end of July – highlighted Government’s lack of a coherent cannabis policy and the ‘legal absurdity’ of the Cannabis Act, the only legal foundation for the status quo.
Mpondoland has become a ‘national embarrassment’ for Government
Cheeba Africa Summit organizer Trenton Birch says Government’s failure to include legacy cannabis communities is at the heart of the collapse of South Africa’s reform missteps.
“Sadly, I think it’s a disaster” he told Cannabiz Africa last month. “I mean these are the people who put South Africa on the global map for cannabis and they still have no license option, are still considered criminals in the eyes of the law and have had very little economic or infrastructure support. The government has done nothing but spin their wheels on this matter for the last seven years and to be blunt it is a national embarrassment.”
Indeed, at the Cheeba Summit, Mpondoland cannabis stakeholders were far more concerned about access to market than changing the law. The Mpondoland Cannabis Belt Association’s (MCBA) leaders, Snoux Poswa and Philisande Mahlakata, were interested in cutting deals to get Eastern Cape cannabis to South African consumers than waiting for the government to establish any kind of framework.
“The message from Mpondoland is clear” said Poswa, “just buy our weed”.
Using compliance as a navigational tool to getting to market
To this end, there are three meaningful initiatives underway that Cannabiz Africa is aware of. These are practical measures to link Mpondo growers to the fast-growing private cannabis club movement which, in the absence of clear regulations, offers the most compliant pathway to market:
· The recent launch of the new ‘market access’ portal launched by the Cannabis Trade Association Africa (CTAA), which allows legacy growers to onboard the system for free to link up with ‘compliant’ clubs;
· the MoU signed between the South African Cannabis Club Association (SACCA) and the MCBA and the Khoisan growers represented by Chief Zainedien Simmers which is the first step in enlarging the ‘closed loop’ to sign up legacy farmers as ‘member growers’
· the Mpondoland Plug Project initiated by Harambe Solutions that has a pilot project involving legacy growers bringing commercial strains into the mix that would meet current consumer demands and prove that Mpondoland cannabis is more than just about landrace;
CTAA chair Tebogo Thlopane says: “The cannabis industry has grown faster than its infrastructure — and nowhere is that gap felt more than by the legacy farmers and rural communities who have been growing for generations. There are thousands of dispensaries across this country, but the people growing the flower are not supplying them”.
He says the CTAA portal was built “so that a grower in a rural area can participate in a credible, quality-assured value chain from cultivation all the way to market. This is about giving them a seat at the table — with the lowest possible barriers to entry.”
Cannabis Act looks dead in the water
These initiatives have become all the more important given that the Cannabis Act has hit a dead end even before its final regulations have been published.
The Act, which makes no accommodation for legacy growers but removes cannabis from the Drugs Act, is now enmeshed in what is likely to be a lengthy court process following the far-reaching legal challenge launched by SA Cannabis Development Council chair, Gareth Prince.
Part A of Prince et al’s urgent application to the Western Cape High Court, which is on the court roll for 31 July 2026, is a call for a halt to cannabis-related arrests. Part B challenges the underlying assumptions behind the Cannabis Act.
Although Prince’s priority is to stop SAPS victimization of vulnerable cannabis communities, his aim is to reset the dial on Government’s whole approach to reform.
At the Cheeba Summit, he turned down a public appeal by the Hemp and Cannabis Master Plan’s project manager and DTIC advisor, John Jeffrey, to hold back on his challenge and negotiate.
Jeffrey warned that the Western Cape High Court challenge could set cannabis reform ‘back to square one’. Prince thought this was a good idea, calling the Cannabis Act “a slap in the face for the dagga community”..
As Afristar’s Nic Heinemann explains, Prince is not asking the court for minor adjustments. “He is seeking an immediate halt to cannabis arrests and asking the court to declare the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act constitutionally invalid in its entirety on the grounds that it was incorrectly enacted, failed to emerge from genuine public participation and creates a right to use cannabis while making its exercise impossible for most South Africans”.
What is to be done about Mpondoland?
While the Mpondo marketing initiatives are focusing on compliance as a navigational tool on the route to market, the big question remains” ‘What is to be done About Mpondoland?”.
Eastern Cape lawyer Ricky Stone told ICS 2026 that South Africa ran the risk of “destroying ancient practices by not designing regulations around them”. He said that by making “outdoor the default”, the thousands of traditional growers could be incorporated into the mainstream in a way that also served social justice. He said cannabis rights and human rights were interlocked and from a policy perspective should be treated as such.
He said a new framework should play to South Africa’s natural advantages of sunshine, climate and indigenous knowledge systems (IKS).: “Then indigenous people would have a place in the sector. They could be ‘grandfathered into the legal system”.
Soweto Cannabis Association chair Tia Ramfate says the first step Government should take in trying to rescue the situation is to start genuinely negotiating with affected communities.
“We know that community-based approaches work in Africa and we need to start creating a space within South African law that recognizes that, and a law that understands the human relationships with the plant. Cannabis is a tool for community development and rural revitalization, and the law should encourage this”.
Ramfate, also co-founder of the AfuRak Foundation, told ICS 2026 that community-based cannabis laws would allow for traditional healer inclusion, collective cultivation permits and local manufacturing incentives.
In her kenynote address at ICS 2026 , well known medical cannabis practitioner Dr Shiksha Gallow said that while regulations were urgently needed for cannabis retail, the other harms being done by the lack of guidelines were to sideline indigenous knowledge systems (IKS).
“The system has to include African traditional medicine, where cannabis has been used for generations for pain relief, menstrual comfort, anxiety and other ailments, usually in combination with other plants such as artemisia” she said.
One of the refrains coming out of ICS 2026 was summed up by organizer Sean Hocking, who said “the people who really should be in this room, are not”.
Referring to the absence of senior government officials who had been invited to the Cape Town policy brainstorm, Hocking said many of the answers government officials were looking for, had been ventilated at the conference.
The lone exception to the rule was DTIC advisor John Jeffrey, who was present for the whole three days of ICS 2026 and had extensive discussions with a range of stakeholders. “JJ” as he became affectionately known by the end of ICS 2026, has shown the most willingness of any government representative to date to engage with the real issues raised by stakeholders.
“Watch this space” said one of the ICS delegates. “JJ has got the plot”.
What does fit-for-purpose legislation look like?
So, what would legislation fit for purpose look like? Writing in the Mail and Guardian recently, Heinemann’s answer was:
· It would start where the Constitution starts, with rights, and build outward from there.
· It would treat the right to use cannabis in private as what it is: a self-executing constitutional right that requires no licence, permit or state permission.
· It would guarantee every rights-holder a lawful source of cannabis because a right without access is not a right; it is a fiction.
· It would regulate cannabis according to its use rather than by an arbitrary measure of its chemistry imported from a European regulatory system designed for European conditions.
· It would treat industrial cannabis as what it is in law — an agricultural crop under the agriculture department — but remove it from the criminal framework that continues to render that designation meaningless.
· It would protect indigenous landrace varieties as the national biodiversity assets they are, held in trust by the communities that have cultivated them for generations.
· It would establish a single, coherent act in place of the fragmentation across five pieces of legislation administered by five departments with no common purpose and no meaningful coordination between them.
· Critically, it would be built with communities from the outset, not presented to them at the end. The specific mechanisms for access, supply and commercialisation should emerge from that process. That is not a weakness. That is how legitimate law is made.
Heinemann says the opportunity to reframe cannabis legislation could be a model for the world:
“South Africa wrote a Constitution that the world studied. It did so through radical public participation, deliberate inclusion of those most excluded and a willingness to build something genuinely new rather than amend what colonialism left. The country did not reform apartheid’s laws piecemeal. It replaced them with something better. The cannabis question deserves the same quality of lawmaking.”
Writing in Cannabiz Africa, veteran cannabis mobilizer Rory Blake Taylor says that if South Africa was serious about commercialisation, it should stop pretending that one expensive compliance pathway can carry the whole sector.
“The right approach is a tiered licensing model. At the top end, keep the existing pharmaceutical route for medical products, GMP manufacture and export. Alongside it, create a mainstream commercial framework with distinct licences for cultivation, processing, transport, wholesale distribution, retail dispensaries, testing and on-site consumption clubs”
Mpondoland and landrace
Intimately tied up with Mpondoland issue is that of landrace.
MBCA secretary-general Snoux Poswa told the Summit that the region’s landraces did not have only medical value, but offered full spectrum benefits. They have the backing of OR Tambo District Municipality executive Liso Nqintiza who has played a major supporting role for the MCBA, which represents thousands of cannabis farmers across nine provincial district municipalities with over 225 wards. This is the heartland of legacy cannabis in South Africa, including the districts of O.R. Tambo, Port St. Johns, Nyandeni, Ntabankulu, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Ingquza Hill.
Contrary to popular belief, says Poswa, Mpondoland does have industrially viable landrace strains . Although some local strains had been lost to hybridisation, there was ongoing work to profile them.
“We are not only trying to claim these strains, we’re also trying to identify those varieties and their characteristics and to see whether they have been registered” said Poswa.
He added that local landraces were being genetically profiled with Technology Innovation Agency (TIA) support. He said seedbanks in the region were informal (‘glass bottles on dark shelves’) and that these needed to be properly organzed into formal seedbanks.
He said Mpondoland cannabis had full-spectrum applications, not only for medicinal value. He explained that local strains had a different levels of THC and could be used for industrial and nutritional purposes as well as medicinal and adult-use. He said there was an urgent need for farmers to be able to add value to their crops as most were producing only flower.
MBCA chair Philasande Mahlakata told the Cheeba Summit she was aware of nine different strains for which indigenous knowledge heritage recommended different planting seasons. She also said some of these had immense medicinal value including cancer-treating properties.
Poswa and Mahlakata detailed the following steps being taken to preserve their region’s landraces.
– Strategic partnerships with stakeholders including South African Cannabis and Hemp Alliance (SACHA) and government, which was in the process of procuring a freeze drier among other equipment.
– Improving cultivation methods in order to preserve landraces
– Ensuring cultivation methods were properly followed to guarantee quality
– Mobilise and help formalise indigenous farmers
– Identifying various landrace seed properties and their suitable end products
– Establish TIA-supported innovation and entrepreneurship centres in the region
– Tracing and supporting partner farmers
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