South Africa has a drinking problem and addressing it is not a short-term project. It’s a matter of mindset and culture, and the Band-Aid of a temporary alcohol ban does nothing to address it, and perhaps only serves to strengthen the causes of the petty bureaucrats and authoritarians, writes Jacques Rousseau. President Cyril Ramaphosa reinstated a ban on the sale of alcohol at both restaurants and retail outlets on December 28 2020, and that ban is still in place today, with an end-date to be determined by the whims of the National Coronavirus Command Council. Two background points: South Africa has a very unhealthy relationship with alcohol. We drink a lot, and we die on the roads a lot, whether behind the wheel or stumbling into oncoming traffic. Futhermore, alcohol has historically been used (and still is, although in increasingly rare/marginal cases) as a mechanism to buttress racial injustice in our wine industry, even though the “dop system” (where farm workers are (partly) paid in wine) was outlawed in 2003.