Friends of Hemp South Africa co-founder M Ayanda Bam says the Health Minister should rescind the ban immediately or face legal consequences.

“We’re not going to be as kind as others are. We are not asking the Minister to withdraw this, we are demanding that he do so” said Bam. “And we are going to proceed with litigation should the DoH decide not to withdraw it or delay withdrawing it”.

He told the Cheeba What the Hemp 2.0? webinar on 18 March 2025 that many businesses had been dealt a severe blow.

“There are already damages and we can quantify them, and fortunately they’ve given us quite a lot of fodder for any other challenges we will pursue but this is absolutely absurd.”

 Bam said intervention was needed at the highest level.”The promises made by the President who is the head of state need to be followed. There is also a lead minister here, a new lead minister for co-ordinating all our cannabis and hemp industrialization and policy planning, and that is Minister Parks Tau.

“These guys need to be held account here and if their officials are recalcitrant, they have to be put into line. I think that just goes without saying.”

Cannabis Trade Association Africa chair Tebogo Thlapane (pictured above) agreed that Government policy makers were unreachable.

Speaking on the Cheeba webinar, he said “We have very powerful people in very high positions. They are ignorant and making laws that affect millions and millions of people. We first need an injunction order against this whole thing and then we need to after these people personally."

Thlapane said officials should be held personally liable for the financial havoc that they had caused. “Instead of using government money to protect themselves, we need to remove all of that and go at them personally; personally after the Minister of Health, personally after Anban Pillay and anyone else in that department”.

“They must feel the heat that we are all feeling. They must feel the frustration we are feeling. People are losing money every day because of stupid laws that are made by people who don’t have knowledge of what they are doing, and they must pay”.

Business Day reported on 19 March 2025 that some 1400 businesses had been affected and over 400 SMME’s by the hemp foodstuff ban.

Bam said “What they’re talking about as the DoH is not the same as what was in the gazette; they are now backtracking, talking about labelling and whatnot, this is complete nonsense”

“It’s a complete obfuscation of the fact that they made a major blunder that has consequences beyond the cannabis industry because these are products that have been legally traded in SA for decades without any challenges, Now they’re affecting folks the likes of Woolworths, Shoprite, Dischem, Faithful by Nature. We are talking tens of millions of rand in terms of damages from this. It’s wholly unjustifiable.

We really do have a regulatory crisis at the moment, an example of what happens when you try and coordinate a plan across all these sectors. There's no consistency around this ban between DoH and its agency SAHPRA around this issue, and if they can't get this right were going to have a major challenge trying to get this altogether".

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