As governments across Africa scramble to regulate the fast-evolving landscape of nicotine consumption, one pressing threat looms large on the horizon: the rise of illicit trade in vaping products. While policymakers often act intending to protect public health, especially youth, from the unknowns of new nicotine delivery systems, the unintended consequences of harsh, misaligned, or poorly enforced regulations could open the floodgates to black market activity.

Ironically, by trying to control vaping, African policymakers may instead hand over the market to smugglers, counterfeiters, and unregulated sellers. Here’s how that risk becomes a reality.

When a product that is in demand is banned outright without offering legal alternatives or harm reduction pathways, it doesn’t disappear. Consumers, especially smokers seeking alternatives, simply look elsewhere. In countries like Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia, where nicotine vapes are either banned or heavily restricted, evidence already shows rising use of illicit and unregulated products.

Prohibition creates scarcity, and scarcity drives prices and profits-perfect conditions for smugglers and criminal networks to thrive.

Tax policies that treat safer nicotine products like combustible cigarettes, or worse, tax them even higher, fail to acknowledge the risk continuum of nicotine delivery. Vapes, while not risk-free, are widely acknowledged by institutions like Public Health England to be at least 95% less harmful than cigarettes.

Over-taxation drives legitimate vendors out of the market and creates financial incentives for illicit traders, who pay no taxes and can undercut legal prices easily. Consumers follow affordability, not legality.

Many African countries still lack any clear, science-based regulations for vaping products. In such legal vacuums, two things happen: Legitimate businesses stay away to avoid uncertainty and future losses, and Illicit suppliers fill the gap with unregulated imports, often of dubious quality.

Even where regulations exist, they are often the result of lazy copy-paste approaches, where foreign tobacco control laws, designed for very different social and economic contexts, are imported wholesale, without adapting to local realities or considering the unique challenges of African markets.

Without clear, locally-relevant rules, authorities can’t enforce standards, and consumers can’t distinguish between safe and unsafe products. Parliamentary oversight visits to countries with proactive and vaping-friendly regulations, such as the U.K. and New Zealand, can help inform African policy and guide legislators toward balanced frameworks.

In a continent where tobacco-related disease kills hundreds of thousands annually, denying safer alternatives or letting criminals control their supply would be a tragic failure. Policymakers must choose: will they shape the market for the public good, or surrender it to the black market?

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