On 23 August 2021 Parliament was briefed for the first time on the National Cannabis Master Plan. This is an excerpt from the minutes of that meeting recorded by the Parliamentary Monitoring Group:
“DTIC reported on its role in the Cannabis Master Plan, whose manufacturing and product development pillar it led. One of its primary responsibilities was to develop a cannabis commercialisation policy, which would prioritise four sectors: medicines, cosmetics, textiles, and food and beverages. Its other primary responsibilities were to facilitate the inclusion of previously disadvantaged community enterprises, and to develop markets and incentives to help companies participate in industrialisation and commercialisation. In this regard, it would seek to support small-scale cannabis farmers – who numbered over 900 000 in South Africa – in overcoming barriers to entry. One of the most significant barriers was the very high cost of registration and licenses, which could run into millions of rands.”
The minutes also record the following contradiction was picked up early in the process by MP’s:
“The Cannabis Bill did not directly or comprehensively respond to the Master Plan, because it dealt with private use rather than commercialisation – a disjoint which one Member referred to as the elephant in the room.”
At the meeting of the Justice and Correctional Services Portfolio Committee, the DTIC identified ‘three central issues that had to be expedited’.
We are now five years down the line.
Read and Weep
DTIC recommendation #1
Recommendation in August 2021:
First, the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development had to work to clarify and reconcile various pieces of legislation. Apart from finalising the Cannabis for Private Purposes Bill, it urgently had to remove hemp from the list of banned substances in the schedules to the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act.
Situation in August 2026:
The Department of Justice has not clarified or reconciled various pieces of legislation; the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act has not yet been finalized and will probably never see the light of day in its current form; and cannabis (hemp) has not yet been removed from the Drugs Act;
DTIC recommendation #2
Recommendation in August 2021
Second, government had to facilitate access to licenses for medical cannabis production, which would be issued by the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority. At the same time, DALRRD had to resolve legislation around access to non-medical cannabis.
Situation in August 2026:
SAHPRA has facilitated access to licenses for medical cannabis production, and there are over 120 licensees. However, many of them are producing cannabis for the illegal domestic ‘recreational’ market and are not exporting. The Agriculture Department has not resolved legislation around access to non-medical cannabis.
DTIC recommendation #3
Recommendation in August 2021
Third, ongoing research and development was needed, including on standards, to guide the industrialisation process.
Situation in August 2026:
Ongoing research has been haphazard; there is no government intervention to protect landraces and no standards have been released to guide the industrializatrion process, which hasn’t been defined either.
To Be Fair, Getting Nowhere Slowly Has Taken a Lot of Hard Work
Five years later the Plan has all but collapsed in the face of market reality, policy confusion and legislative ineptness. We are not back to square one. We never left it in the first place.
The first step to get off square one is for the government to do what it said it would do in the first place – remove cannabis from the Drugs Act schedules so that it can properly be defined as an agricultural crop and regulated as such!
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s 2022 State of the Nation Address was a love letter to the cannabis community, promising to create a new ‘green economy’ that would provide jobs and uplift the rural poor.
The intended beneficiaries of the grand new master plan, drawn up by the Ministry of Agriculture, were the thousands of legacy farmers that for generations had made a living out of growing and selling cannabis. The heartland of legacy cannabis is Mpondoland in the Eastern Cape.
However, despite today they remain locked out of the legislative framework. In creating the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act (CfPPA), the state’s legal architects deliberately chose to restrict access to the plant as much as possible. At the same time as their colleagues in Agriculture and the DTIC were working on a new framework to open up access to the plant as much as possible. The fact that the two were pulling in opposite directions is one of the root causes of today’s cannabis policy paralysis.
To remove cannabis from the Drugs Act, the Justice and Constitutional Development Department sought to use the mechanism of the CfPPA to do so. State legislators inserted a clause in the CfPPA that would trigger the removal of cannabis from the Drugs Act, but instead of decriminalizing the plant, it retained punitive sanctions for ‘dealing’, excluded legacy growers and continued criminalizing consumers.
The irony of outlawing ‘dealing’ while drawing up a commercial cannabis policy was not lost on private stakeholders who submitted over 120 presentations to Parliament’s Justice and Correctional Services Portfolio Committee in 2022 and 2023, almost all calling for the development of a regulated domestic adult-use cannabis market.
Instead, the Committee ignored public input, good policy, scientific evidence and plain old-fashioned common sense, to sign off a bill that was so defective as to be not only constitutionally deficient, but entirely unenforceable.
Both houses of Parliament passed the Act without question, and President Ramaphosa signed it off on 29 May 2023, without the regulations that would give it legal force.
Surprisingly Enough, the Rush Job on the Cannabis Act Resulted in Legal Absurdity
Since then, the Act has remained in abeyance with its basic assumptions now under legal scrutiny even before the final regulations have been published.
Parts of the Act are being challenged in the Western Cape High Court on the grounds that it doesn’t pass constitutional muster. International lawyers have labelled the Act a ‘legal absurdity’ as it recognizes the rights of adults to consume and possess cannabis in private put criminalizes citizens for trying to access that right.
With the Act now unlikely to surface any time soon, what’s happening with the removal of cannabis from the Drugs Act and its reclassification as an agricultural product (apart from medical cannabis)?
Whispers in the Deep: Cannabis Will Be Removed From the Drugs Act Schedule Before Christmas
The Department of Agriculture says a ‘legislative alignment exercise’ is underway with the Departments of Justice, Health and the DTIC, but as it stands, the new Plant Improvement Act, designed to govern the hemp sector, and gazetted in December 2025, is not fully in force as low THC cannabis is still defined as a drug.
Cannabiz Africa has not been able to get official comment from the Justice Department on what Plan B is regarding the removal of cannabis from the Drugs Act.
However, corridor talk is that an amendment to this effect has been drawn up by constitutional affairs experts and will be published in the Government Gazette before year end.
Don’t hold your breath, but that would be a good way for the state to breathe life back into the currently defunct National Cannabis Master Plan.
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