Image: Kobus Schoeman, GOA, source: Linked In.
South Africa’s cannabis industry likes to blame government for everything.
The law remains uncertain, departments do not coordinate, enforcement is inconsistent and regulation moves at the speed of a stoned tortoise.
All true.
But government did not create every problem. We have done a spectacular job of sabotaging ourselves.
Greed replaced cooperation. Personalities became camps. Non-commercial clubs became stepping stones into barely disguised retail. Open-source work was copied without its safeguards. Organisations calling for standards attacked those who enforced unpopular rules. Too many people wanted regulation only if it regulated somebody else.
I do not say this as an outsider. I helped build one of the systems caught in the middle of it.
Grow One Africa made mistakes. We sometimes spoke with more certainty about the law than the law justified. Our club model was never tested and approved by a court. We became administratively heavy, expensive and too ambitious for our resources.
Some ideas remained presentations longer than they should have. But we tried to build something accountable while much of the market was racing to make a quick buck.
A Model Built in the Open
GOA’s story began with Die Boomhuis and the private adult-use movement surrounding the 2018 Constitutional Court judgment. The judgment protected private possession, use and cultivation but did not provide an operating manual for organised cannabis communities.
We tried to write one.
GOA developed a non-commercial framework connecting adult members, private clubs and the people cultivating or processing on their behalf. Between formal affiliations, prospective operators and broader industry engagements, we consulted approximately 325 clubs and walked them through incorporation, governance, contracts, membership, cultivation, sharing, recordkeeping and financial administration.
We published substantial parts of our material openly because we believed responsible practices should spread.
Terms now heard throughout the industry— “Cultivating and Processing Member”, “Sharing Station” and “Consumption Area”—were coined and popularised by GOA while we were trying to give practical language to a legal vacuum.
We created awareness and harm reduction campaigns, compliance files, inspection processes, contracts, signage, training material, financial controls and software.
According to cumulative GOA and GOAlite internal records, participating clubs registered 47,660 member profiles, recorded 1,490 employment opportunities, generated 4,392 payslips and accounted for R19,668,450 in taxes.
More than R100 million was recorded in reimbursements to Cultivating and Processing Members. That was not GOA turnover or profit. It was value moving through participating club systems to people cultivating and processing for members.
These figures have not been independently audited, but they show that GOA was not merely talking about a future industry. It was supporting real clubs, members, cultivation, products, jobs, payments and taxes.
Then everybody helped themselves.
Everyone Wanted the Model. Fewer Wanted the Rules
GOA’s terminology, contracts, signage, procedures and website wording began appearing elsewhere. We even found websites carrying text copied from our site without changing GOA’s CIPC registration number.
That is not innovation. That is copy, paste and cannabis capitalism wearing somebody else’s compliance jacket.
Open source meant people could learn from and improve the work. It did not mean taking the paperwork, discarding the governance and using the remaining shell to justify ordinary commercial retail.
Yet that is what parts of the club movement became.
A membership form at the door became holy water: sprinkle it over a dispensary and retail was suddenly declared private. Clubs intended to serve closed communities became public shops with loyalty cards.
Member-linked cultivation became general stock procurement. Non-commercial language remained on the paperwork while commercial ambition took over behind the counter.
The model became a convenient stepping stone: learn through GOA, download the documents, build membership, establish supply and then leave the framework when its controls became inconvenient.
The legality laundromat was not limited to clubs. We observed operators selling packaged “compliance” consisting of security, access control, a point-of-sale system and access to an online medical consultation. But technology does not cleanse a questionable supply chain. Section 21 allows access to specified unregistered medicines under defined conditions and on the authority granted by SAHPRA. It is not a general retail licence capable of blessing any bag of cannabis entering a dagga shop.
We saw brokers travelling with facility catalogues containing hundreds of products. We encountered trim and biomass bought wherever it could be found and then presented as if proximity to a medicinal facility magically made it lawful or export-ready. We heard facility representatives publicly describe local-market ambitions that appeared difficult to reconcile with the export or medicinal purposes for which their facilities said they were authorised.
We also saw freelance growers supply outside the club networks they were meant to serve—including copy-and-paste shops competing directly with clubs carrying the compliance costs—and then complain that those clubs did not have enough members.
Not every club, grower, facility or medical practitioner behaved improperly. But responsible operators were expected to compete against supply chains carrying fewer restrictions, lower administrative costs and considerably larger mark-ups.
Traditional growers remained at the bottom. In places such as Pondoland, legacy cultivators continued receiving a fraction of the final retail value while intermediaries captured the margin.
For a Pondoland grower, access to a responsible club market can depend on one basic question: who will finance the first consignment? A strict supply-follows-demand club seldom has spare cash to reimburse speculative stock upfront, while growers living from harvest to harvest understandably need immediate payment rather than waiting
for member reimbursements under the consignment model accepted by contracted CPMs.
The market calls this a lack of access. Often, it is a working-capital gap that nobody benefiting further up the value chain is willing to fund. In wholesale offers and retail pricing seen by GOA, we observed mark-ups exceeding 500% on certain brokered products. By comparison, even when a club’s member contribution was approximately twice the CPM reimbursement, the remaining spread still had to cover rent, wages, taxes, administration, security, losses, testing and technology.
Voluntary compliance was sent into a gunfight armed with a lever-arch file.
Thailand offered another warning. Rapid liberalisation produced thousands of storefronts before durable controls existed; when the rules tightened, many closed or fell out of the formal market.
Meanwhile, GOA and affiliated operators began receiving wholesale offers for flower represented as Thai-grown through channels where provenance was almost impossible to establish. Whether every packet was genuinely Thai mattered less than the lesson: a Green Rush without traceability eventually leaves growers, consumers and responsible operators carrying the damage.
When Compliance Became the Enemy
GOA could either ignore these contradictions or enforce the framework it had asked others to adopt. We chose enforcement—and discovered that the industry loved compliance until compliance required saying no to somebody popular, connected or profitable.
When GOA cancelled the membership of a prominent industry figure for breaking club rules, we became a target within parts of the advocacy community. When we subsequently suspended or terminated affiliations with clubs or CPMs, the underlying breaches were often forgotten while GOA was publicly presented as controlling, vindictive or monopolistic.
A compliance framework that never sanctions non-compliance is not a framework. It is décor. The same conflict followed us into the exhibition circuit. In April 2023, GOA formally complained after observing vendors apparently offering prohibited cannabis and psilocybin products at a major industry exhibition, including from publicly sponsored stands.
We questioned the vetting of beneficiaries, the use of taxpayer-funded stalls and why businesses attempting to follow tax and operating rules were expected to compete against apparently prohibited trade.
Months later, we transported our locally developed decorticator and assisted Indigenous Knowledge Systems representatives and rural participants to attend a Durban exhibition where we expected to co-exhibit. The arrangement had not been properly communicated and approved—a mistake we later acknowledged.
The response was nevertheless humiliating. Security instructed me to leave the exhibition hall. GOA branding was prohibited, including branded clothing worn by our affiliates. After transporting people and machinery to showcase rural participation, we found ourselves outside while the industry celebrated itself inside.
Our apology records the communication failure, removal and branding prohibition. It does not prove that our earlier complaint caused the exclusion. But from where I stood, the pattern was difficult to ignore: challenge questionable conduct and become unwelcome; enforce club rules and become the villain; ask for transparency and be accused of dividing the industry.
“Unity” too often meant keeping quiet.
The Goodbye That Wasn’t
In 2025, a previous Cannabiz Africa article said I was saying goodbye to GOA. That created the impression that I had left.
I did not leave.
From April 2025, I stopped drawing a salary, as did the other co-founders, and continued working in the background. I stepped away from daily visibility to give Vanessa de Sousa greater operating authority as CEO, while remaining GOA’s director, 100% shareholder and responsible person. I stopped paying myself and tried to give somebody else room to lead. The responsibility—and the risk—never left me.
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