On 13 March 2026, in Government Gazette 54320, under General Notice 3824, the Minister of Tourism published a Code of Good Practice for Short-Term Rentals. It tells you to keep a first aid kit somewhere your guest can find it. It tells you to fit smoke detectors and to show people where the fire escape is. It tells you to carry liability insurance against injury, death or loss. It tells you to pay your tax, maintain your premises, and make sure a responsible contact person is available when the neighbours have something to say.

None of that is unreasonable. Most of it is what a decent host does on a Tuesday without being asked. And that is precisely the trick, because a code that told you to do something outrageous would have been shouted down in a week, whereas a code that tells you to be sensible arrives wearing a cardigan and is still standing there five years later when it has grown teeth.

Read further and the tone changes. Your guest, the document says, must respect the cultural norms and values of the host community. Your guest must refrain from using the property for unlawful, nefarious or unauthorised purposes. Nefarious. That is the actual word, sitting in a Government Gazette in 2026, in a country whose Constitutional Court held eight years ago that what an adult does with a cannabis plant in private is not the state’s business. Unlawful has a meaning. A court can tell you what it is. Nefarious means whatever the man reading it over your shoulder has decided it means this morning, and unauthorised begs the only question worth asking, which is authorised by whom.

Voluntary is the word the department reaches for, and it is doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting. The Code says of itself that it is guidance, non-binding, issued pending the amendment of the Tourism Act. Pending. That is not a throwaway. The department told the portfolio committee that it is reviewing the Tourism Act following Cabinet’s approval of the 2024 White Paper, that drafting of a Tourism Amendment Bill has begun, and that it expects to take that Bill to Cabinet during the 2026 to 2027 financial year before it goes to Parliament. So the voluntary code is not the destination. It is the survey peg. It is the thing that gets everybody used to the shape of the fence before anybody pays for the barbed wire.

You do not have to take my word for the direction of travel, because a member of the committee asked the question outright. Ms L Ligaraba of the ANC asked the department how it would ensure that the short-term rental code translated into enforceable action. Ms A Hlongo, also of the ANC, asked why the code was silent on making short-term rentals contribute to the tourism levy. Ms N Buthelezi of MK Party put it to the department that short-term rentals do not generate direct tourism jobs. Ms H Ismail of the DA asked what metrics would measure the code’s success and what municipalities were meant to do with it. Nobody in that room was under the impression they were discussing a leaflet. They were discussing a levy, an enforcement mechanism and a role for the municipality, and they were discussing them in respect of an instrument that describes itself as voluntary.

The municipality is not waiting, in any event. Cape Town has proposed that every property listed on a booking platform register with the city and display a registration number on its listing, that platforms and owners share availability data with the city, and that a property available for short-term letting for more than half the nights in a year be rated as commercial rather than residential, with the rating change to take effect from 1 July 2027. Register, display your number, hand over your data, pay the commercial rate. That is not guidance. That is a licence in everything but name, arriving from the layer of the state that nobody thinks to watch. Fuckers.

Now put the cannabis question next to it, because it is the same question in a different jacket. Private adult use has been lawful since the Constitutional Court decided Prince in 2018. The Act that Parliament passed to give that judgment statutory form was assented to on 28 May 2024 and has still not commenced. The draft regulations under it were published for comment on 2 February 2026 and nothing has been gazetted since. Two and a bit years, and the state cannot bring into force a law it has already written and signed about what an adult may do in his own home. Understand that I am not complaining about the delay. I do not want that Act commenced. I am pointing at a machine that cannot work its own levers and is nonetheless reaching for a second set.

That same state has found the time, in the same period, to write conduct guidance about your spare room. It has found the time to tell your guest to respect the cultural norms and values of the host community. It has not found the time to tell that guest, or you, what the law about the plant actually is, because the instrument that would say so is sitting in a drawer. So the host is left standing between a lawful activity the state will not confirm and a soft standard the state has just published, and soft standards do not stay empty. They fill up with whatever the complainant, the platform, the body corporate or the municipal officer decides they contain. A host with a cannabis friendly listing is not going to be caught by the fire extinguisher clause. He is going to be caught by nefarious, and by unauthorised, and by cultural norms, and by whichever of his neighbours takes the strongest view.

Who is this actually landing on. Reporting in March put short-term rentals at roughly half of South Africa’s accommodation sector and at about seven in ten of the units in central Cape Town, and cited a 2025 survey of hosts finding that around eight in ten are women and around seven in ten are not in full time employment, with the average listing supporting more than two and a half people. This is not a hotel lobby. This is the country’s least protected income, being brought slowly into the compliance perimeter by a document that everyone agrees is not binding (yet).

And the demand is not in doubt. South Africa took 991 696 international tourist arrivals in July 2026 alone, up 12,5% on the year, with 6 576 169 in the first seven months. The state can count the visitor to the last person as he comes through the door. It simply will not tell him, or his host, what the position is on the one plant he most wants to ask about.

There is a familiar pattern here and it is worth naming. The same government that has not produced a lawful commercial pathway for cannabis nonetheless expects the sector to grow by 10% a year off a baseline it has variously put at R10 billion to R14 billion, while the illicit trade it complains about is estimated at something over R36 billion, and the responsibility for any of it is spread across eleven departments. That is the machine. It cannot commence a law, it cannot define a market, it cannot decide which department owns the file, and yet it can always, always find a page in the Gazette for guidance about how you ought to behave in your own house. Rage Against the Machine.

Our position has not moved and it will not. Full freedom to grow, use and possess, with zero state interference. A spare room is not a hotel and a plant in a private garden is not a charge sheet.

And let me be exact about what we are asking for, because it is not what the reformers ask for. We are not asking the state to hurry up and commence its Act. We are not asking for a better code, a cleaner register, a fairer cap, a friendlier inspector or a commencement proclamation with our name on the invitation list. Every one of those is the same hand on the same shoulder, only warmer. The Act should be forgotten. Cannabis should be treated as what it plainly is, which is a viable and lucrative agricultural product, and it should be dealt with in law exactly as the state deals with potatoes, maize, figs, olives, honey and pumpkins.

Consider what that actually means, because South Africans already know how it works. A woman makes fig konfyt in her kitchen and sells it at the farm stall on the R62 and nobody requires her to register the tree. A man keeps bees and sells honey off the back of a bakkie at the Saturday market and no official counts the hives. A smallholder sells eggs, marmalade, olives, dried peaches and pumpkins to whoever pulls off the road, and the state’s involvement in the transaction is confined to the tax he pays on what he earns. Quality is settled where quality is always settled, which is by the buyer coming back or not coming back. The bad konfyt dies quietly on the shelf. Nobody had to be raided for it.

Even where the state does insist on a licence, as it does with liquor, look carefully at what it licences. It licences the sale. It does not count the vines in your garden, it does not weigh the grapes in your bucket, and it has never once sent a man to your house to establish how much wine you have made for yourself. The boutique producer on a hillside is regulated at the till and nowhere else. That distinction is the whole of the argument, and the state understands it perfectly well everywhere except here, where it proposes instead to regulate what a citizen possesses rather than what he does.

So: free the plant and let the farmers farm. Let a man grow it, let him trade it inter partes, let him sell a hundred grams to his neighbour the way he sells him a bag of naartjies, and let the market do what markets do. Quality will rise to the top because the grower who cures properly will be the grower people come back to, the chancer will be found out inside a season, prices will find their level, the R36b that currently moves in the dark will move in the light, and money will flow to the people who actually did the work. That is not a radical proposition. It is how this country already handles every other thing that grows out of its soil.

Now the honest half, and it is stated here plainly so that no reader mistakes the one for the other. That is the law as it should be. It is not the law as it is. As things stand today, private cultivation and private use by an adult are lawful on the authority of Prince, and dealing remains a criminal offence, and nothing in the paragraph above changes that or is intended to be acted on as though it did. We say what we want. We do not pretend it has already happened, and we do not invite anybody to behave as if it had.

Until that happens, the practical advice is unglamorous. Write your own house rules before somebody writes them for you, in plain language, in the listing, so that what is permitted and where is a matter of record and not of interpretation. Keep your insurance real rather than notional. Read the by-laws and the scheme rules for the property you are actually letting, because they bind you today whatever a voluntary code does or does not say. And when the Amendment Bill comes out for comment, comment on it, because the people who show up at the comment stage are the only people the drafters ever hear.

One correction, ours, since we are asking it of others. Early reporting on this Code described it as imposing hotel style obligations, including compulsory sharing of guest identity and biometric data. The gazetted text does not contain a biometric requirement. It does require platforms to give hosts guest contact information and to assist government with information relating to hosts, which is quite bad enough on its own and needs no help from an invented clause. We would rather be right in September than loud in March.

CannaStaySA is an information, advertising and directory platform for adults over eighteen. It does not sell, supply, broker or facilitate the supply of cannabis, and nothing here tells anybody where to obtain any.

Make it before they take it, Selah.