Youth Month usually brings familiar themes. We remember 1976. We speak about courage, resistance and the promise of a better future for young people. We repeat the idea that young South Africans must be protected and empowered.
But beneath the commemorations sits a harder question that rarely gets asked with enough seriousness.
What are the everyday systems still shaping harm in young people’s lives today?
One of them is alcohol.
This month, as SA marks 50 years since the 1976 youth uprisings, the National Treasury is reviewing alcohol taxation policy.
On paper, it is a technical fiscal process. In reality, it is one of the most important public health and economic debates currently unfolding in the country.
This is because it goes to the heart of something SA has never fully resolved. How do you deal with a product that is legal, economically significant, culturally embedded and yet deeply linked to social harm?
At the centre of the proposal is a shift in how alcohol is taxed.
Treasury is considering a system where stronger alcoholic products are taxed more heavily than weaker ones. The logic is straightforward — there’s little doubt price can influence consumption.
If stronger alcohol becomes more expensive, producers may reformulate products and consumers may gradually shift toward lower strength options. It sounds neat in theory.
But South Africa is not a neat environment.
Alcohol here is not just another consumer item. It sits inside a much wider system of inequality, spatial poverty, weak enforcement capacity and a large informal economy.
That combination is what makes this debate far more complex than it first appears.
Because the real issue is not simply how much alcohol costs. It is what cheap, strong and widely available alcohol does inside communities that are already under pressure.
The consequences are visible, even if the causes are often treated separately. Hospitals absorb the injuries. Police stations deal with the violence. Families carry the emotional and financial burden. Road accidents spike.
Young people are exposed early to binge drinking patterns that become normalised long before adulthood. This is the structural reality Treasury is trying to respond to.
But there is another side to the argument that also carries weight.
South African Breweries has warned that steep increases in alcohol taxation, particularly on widely consumed beer products, may unintentionally strengthen the illicit alcohol market.
That is not a theoretical risk. Illicit alcohol already exists at scale in SA, operating outside tax systems, safety regulations and quality controls.
In a weak enforcement environment, price increases can create space for substitution rather than behaviour change.
That is the tension at the centre of this debate. Public health logic says price should be used to reduce harm.
The manufacturer with the most to lose warns consumers may move to cheaper alternatives, legal or not.
Multilayer response
This is why the conversation cannot stop at taxation alone. The deeper question is whether SA has the institutional capacity to implement a multilayered response.
This would entail a taxation policy that is smarter and more targeted, but also enforcement that actually disrupts illicit trade networks.
In turn, also would mean health systems that are prepared for prevention and treatment, not only crisis response.
It also means confronting the normalisation of heavy drinking in social spaces where it is rarely questioned.
Seen properly, this is not just an alcohol tax debate.
It is a test of how SA handles the complexity of social harms that sits across economics, health, policing and culture at the same time.
There is also something significant about the timing.
Fifty years ago, young people confronted systems that were visible, defined and openly enforced.
Today the pressures on young people are more fragmented. They are less about formal systems of control and more about environments that quietly reproduce harm over time.
Alcohol is one of those environments. That is why this debate matters.
Because it forces a shift in thinking from treating alcohol as a revenue source to treating it as a public health and social stability menace with economic consequences, not the other way around.
SA may not get another policy window like this for years.
And what is ultimately being tested is not only tax design.
It is whether the country is willing to deal with the full complexity of a problem it has lived with for generations.
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