South Africa – The 5 Big Cannabis moments of 2024.

South Africa is Africa's biggest commercial cannabis market – and whatever direction she takes – the continent follows. From IPOs, mergers, export targets, and permit rules – here are the 5 likely Big cannabis moments in South Africa in 2024.

Cannabis liberalism flies into outdated ‘trafficking’ rules

In September, South Africa’s Police Service earned praise for instructing police to desist from arresting ordinary users of cannabis and ensuring that cannabis plant material and products containing THC are to be used for private consumer purposes without being regulated as ‘illegal’ as per the country’s so-called Schedule 6 substances laws.

In 2024 – such liberalism is running into confusion. A closer reading of the rules shows that old, colonial ‘Drug Trafficking’ laws in South Africa still punish citizens for possessing “any dangerous dependence-producing substance or any undesirable dependence-producing substance…” of which cannabis remains one.

“We are heading into a circus of a confusing cannabis scene in 2024 in South Africa. The legal grey areas of ‘trafficked drugs’ will clash with the pharmacology of what’s acceptable THC levels,” says Naile Matosa, a commercial attorney who represents cannabis entrepreneurs in the capital, the capital.

Churches relax colonial anti-cannabis resentment

Historically, South Africa’s old colonial European and American churches have publicly taken a harsh stance against cannabis in the last 100 years. (That doesn’t mean priests don’t secretly enjoy a joint).

However, recently, a flurry of churches and clerics have risen in South Africa to openly and proudly take advantage of relaxing attitudes to cannabis. They say they hope to grab the moment in 2024.

While colonial churches in South Africa publicly castigated cannabis, they were doing a bidding for colonial governments that were acting not on ‘morality’ but on a need to restrict Black South Africans from the benefits of cannabis. Behind the scenes, indigenous African clerics continued to use cannabis, in line with their indigenous practices and also as a defiance of colonial rules and economies.

Now that cannabis is gaining fast acceptance in mainstream South Africa and old colonial churches have lost their hold in the ‘new South Africa,’ a number of clerics are openly embracing cannabis. I interview them for this piece.

“In 2024, we are telling our congregants that it’s no sin to use cannabis oil for soothing a sore arm, limp, or migraine. We are moving with the times,” Angelo Dingane, a Zion Christian Church pastor, boasting hundreds of thousands of adherents across South Africa.

Failed cannabis IPOs rise?

In November 2022, Cilo Cybn tried to do Africa’s first cannabis Initial Public Offering on the Johannesburg Stocks Exchange. The attempt failed miserably when only $1million was raised out of a target of $116mn.

Could South Africa’s cannabis entrepreneurs retake a bite of the cherry after this monumental flop? “We won’t stop trying again soon,” Gabrial Theron, founder of Cilo Cybn says.

Observers are pessimistic. “South Africa’s investors are conservative and lack the same appetite for risk found at Wall Street. There has been a global drought of IPOs in the last two years. Any IPO attempt in 2024 is bound to flop again – for now,” says Richard Dluli, an independent banker in Johannesburg, South Africa’s commercial capital.

Cannabis worms its way into South Africa’s celebrated coffee culture.

South Africa is famous in Africa for its lavish coffee culture. Projected to grow by 10.52% and reach $628mn, South Africa, is the continent’s biggest coffee market. Surrounded by neighbors who hit on British colonial-tinged tea culture, South Africa is a contrast as coffee there trumps tea. For many South Africans, a coffee cup is never complete without a cigarette burning.

But now, in the country’s sunny coffee cafes – a puff of cannabis is increasingly replacing tobacco as the companion for a cup of coffee. “We sometimes joke that recreational cannabis is so popular now in Zambia that it may dwarf coffee mugs in sales,” Zunaid Mota, a reveler and café owner, tells me.

This fascinating change of culture from tobacco to cannabis as an accompaniment of coffee is partly due to the aggressive anti-tobacco messaging the South Africa health ministry is ramping up.

South Africa police cannabis take-up to filter to Africa’s police services?

When the South Africa Police Service quietly sent out an internal memo in September asking its officers to stop frivolous arrests of private citizens recreationally using cannabis, it confirmed what was obvious.

South Africa’s police and army officers have openly used cannabis in their private lives and on grueling training missions as a way to calm nerves from policing one of the world’s most violent countries, unions say.

“Our members are silently the largest advocates for recreational and medicinal cannabis because they use it due to the nature of hard policing here. Legalization benefits our members too,” said Clide Sexwale, an organizer with the South Africa Police and Prisons Officers Union.

“We want to see police internal rules allowing officers to use cannabis openly when off-duty and not be punished when they post a picture on Instagram buying cannabis oil.”

This trend of police embracing cannabis in South Africa seems to be catching on in neighboring countries, especially Mozambique.

Mozambique is an enigma. As all countries around her relax cannabis rules, authorities there remain steadfast in banning cannabis consumption. For Mozambique policemen, the ban is strictly enforced. Yet behind the scenes – Mozambique police and army commandos have always used cannabis as a relaxing pastime to absorb the rigors of the job. In certain towns like the coal-rich Tete City– fed-up officers in Mozambique have quietly petitioned their superiors to relax cannabis rules, unions say.

“We are demanding our rights to use cannabis as Mozambique police officers without fearing career victimization. This ban on cannabis legalization in Mozambique flies in the face of economics, seeing that all neighboring countries are legalizing,” Fredo Da Olivere, a unionist with the Mozambique Police Members Union, says via a Whatsapp interview from Tete City.