If we catch you smoking in your car you’d better have a receipt to say where you bought your entjies, Police Minister Bheki Cele has warned.
The days of sellers are also numbered, as smokers will be forced to take cops to their “dealers”.
The sale of cigarettes have been banned during the Coronavirus lockdown, but black market sales have soared, with a single los entjie now going for as much as R15.
During a virtual press briefing last week, Cele said: “Cigarettes must be smoked in your house, as it is not illegal to smoke, the only problem is when we find it in your car and you fail to show us where you got the cigarette.
“When you say you bought the cigarette, here is the receipt, we take you and go and get the person who sold the cigarette to you.”
He said organised crime had taken an advantage of the ban on dop and entjies, and there has been an increase of smuggling these items across the border.
“Our lockdown partners, the SANDF, have disrupted some of these illegal operations mainly along South African borders with Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Swaziland,” he said.
WARN: Bheki Cele wants to catch illegal dealers
Law enforcement agents had confiscated alcohol and cigarettes worth more than R1 million and R1.6 million in March and April respectively.
There has been 200 030 arrests for lockdown contraventions including liquor and cigarette offences, and gatherings.
Cele said most of these arrests were in the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, which have high infection rates.
“Arrested persons were either issued with fines or released on warnings,” he added.