DA welcomes Patel’s u-turn on e-commerce following public and legal pressure

14 May 2020

The Democratic Alliance (DA) welcomes the long overdue unbanning of all e-commerce by Trade, Industry and Competition Minister, Ebrahim Patel during the lockdown. See the new regulations here.

The Minister should not be applauded for doing what was clearly the right and logical thing from the very beginning.

Make no mistake, this is a humiliating about-turn for the Minister after initially banning e-commerce for the irrational reason of it not being "fair".

This repositioning by the Minister follows unrelenting public pressure and legal action that the DA had initiated today in the High Court against the banning of unfettered access to e-commerce by South Africans.

Minister Patel has had to learn a painful lesson that citizens will not tolerate his high-handed ideological madness that he is currently inflicting on us as he seeks to determine what freedoms and rights people should enjoy under the lockdown.

The DA hopes that this backtracking by the Minister will be followed up with him removing the regulations on clothing and how you may wear them which he gazetted on Tuesday evening.

This moral victory for the country on e-commerce is testament to the powerful voice of South Africans and the DA in unison to regain sensibility during this lockdown crisis which has now inflicted pain and suffering on many more people than it should have.

Issued by Dean Macpherson,DA Shadow Minister of Trade and Industry, 14 May 2020